


And This is Work Bitch, by Britney Spears

by verulam (krynon)



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers, M/M, OT3, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Romance, Soulmates, and
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 08:22:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14304675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krynon/pseuds/verulam
Summary: “Who’re you going to see?” croaks Bucky.“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” replies Steve, and for once in his life, it’s him and not Bucky that’s the oblivious one because Bucky’s heart drops through his chest, and Steve doesn’t appear to notice.Bucky's in love with Steve's soulmate. Things could not possibly get any worse, really. And in the end, if you want something in life? You better work, bitch.**(This fic is currently on hiatus so I can finish older fics. It will return! For updates, go to verulamfic.tumblr.com)**





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Vaguely inspired by [this](https://i.redditmedia.com/8i5HPctoc0rpu_7HQypJXQEs8ubaV2l5sOWWAPNIK30.jpg?w=576&s=00a7b9f828023e883179a5d33affc338) image.

It starts with Steve leading him through the woods, because that was currently Steve’s idea of a good time, apparently. They’d driven there, and while it hadn’t been far, Bucky had never been there before. Which, on reflection, was not altogether unsurprising.

Given that it was a forest, and all.

So they hike through the forest, chatting shit about… stuff. Bucky had had a few one night stands in the two weeks prior, and Steve was kind-hearted person in the way Bucky could never bring himself to be with one night stands. It was Jackie, or Jack, or Jason, or something, that Steve actually knew from an art class and was increasingly stressed that Bucky kept fucking. Jason, or Jack, or Jackie was certainly a good person based off of Steve’s estimations, but that didn’t necessarily translate to good partner material.

Besides, he’s hardly looking for his soulmate right now, is he? They’re young, they shouldn’t be looking for long-term love by any stretch of the imagination. No matter what the hoard of twenty-something friends they seemed to have accumulated seemed to think. If you asked Bucky, it was pretty clear that all of their marriages were gonna-

“Don’t say their marriages are gonna fail, Buck, that’s shitty.”

Bucky wrinkles his nose. “Yeah, but it’s true.”

He can feel Steve shoot him a look through his back. “It’s _not_ true though-” He cuts himself off, and Bucky hears the rustling of paper behind him. “Oh,” Steve calls, “You’ve gone the wrong way. Left here.”

Bucky pauses and then swings round, and double checks to make sure that they were, indeed, walking not on any sort of path but on mossy, twiggy, forest-based ground. “I’ve gone the wrong way?” He asks.

Steve’s about ten feet behind him, staring off to the left. “Yeah,” he responds, offhandedly, and for the first time Bucky spots a map in his hand. It’s badly drawn, scrawled almost, on the back of what looks like a napkin from some fast-food joint.

“How are you-?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, walking forward through an equally nondescript gap in the trees. “You went the wrong way.”

“I didn’t know there was a _right_ way.”

“Well,” says Steve, as Bucky jogs up towards him. “There was. And you weren’t going that way.”

Bucky grimaces. “Yeah, good one. It all looks the damn same. Where are we going, anyway?”

“Does not,” retorts Steve. “Else I wouldn’t know where we’re going. Also, you’ll find out real soon.”

“What’re you, eight?” Bucky snorts. “C’mon man, ‘fess up.”

“It’s literally just around the corner-” he tries.

Bucky frowns. “What the fuck, are you a _child_ -”

“Hey, asshole, only one of us looks like a child from here and it’s Bucky ‘but I want to know _now_ ’ Barnes-”

“Hey!” he protests, only for Steve to cut over him again.

“-and look, here we are.” And Steve stops immediately in front of Bucky, probably deliberately, and in trying to avoid tripping, he sticks his hand out only for Steve to trip forward with him. They both make strangled noises from the back of their throats in shock, and it is, of course, all Steve’s fault.

They slowly reclaim their balance, one shakey limb at a time, and by the time Steve is standing up straight again, Bucky is looking around the space with something that’s part grudging interest and part irritated concern for Steve, who has apparently dragged him to a clearing with nothing-the-fuck in it.

He says as much. “There’s nothing here.”

“Look at the sign, you animal, just because you never look before you leap-” Steve snarks out, cracking his knuckles.

So Bucky does and spots a sign that’s almost the same green as the leaves and moss that coats the trees.

It reads, in all capital letters,

“ SOULMATE INTERDIMENSIONAL CROSSING POINT, “  
“ PLEASE CLOSE ALL PORTALS WHEN FINISHED TO HELP MINIMISE CROSS DIMENSIONAL CONTAMINATION,”

Which is just the biggest pile of bullshit that Bucky’s heard in a long time.

He glares at Steve. “Are you kidding me? This is some of your pal’s mumbo-jumbo-”

And just like that, the air begins to tremble. The trees begin to warp, and the ground begins to shake with  
some kind of vibrant energy. It traps- seems to trap- whatever it was that makes humans stay balanced, and the floor abruptly seems to rise up off the ground in a way he can barely comprehend. The sound is deafening, painful, ringing like the sea crashing in his ears, and they both drop to the floor in a scream.

And as they fall away from each other, everything intensifies. The world crashes, it pounds like the banging of a drum and it yells at them that something wasn’t right and as the group continues to rise up Bucky breathes and is dimly aware of the fact that things seemed to start rolling in towards them. Surrounding them, crushing inwards and inwards in whiteness that only seems to abate when he struggles to his feet.

Things crash inwards, and Steve wasn’t a small dude anymore, but Bucky’s immediate impulse is to prevent whatever was about to happen from happening, so he launches himself towards Steve in a barrel of energy that twitches and tremors against the faltering ground-

And the trembling stops. As they collide, the waves smashing against each other that had rung so loud in his ears collapses into nothing.

There is suddenly, where the whiteness was, a soft and almost tangible blackness, hovering in front of them as the forest resumes its old shape and the world relaxes.

It feels warm, Bucky can tell from where he’s pulling himself to his feet, just inches behind Steve.

And- there’s a brief, tiny moment of reflection, just before it happens.

It happens in slow motion. Steve looks around at him, quickly, then back at the inky, smooth and vaporous blackness that was hanging somehow static in front of them.

And then, within the split-second moment, Bucky seriously doubts Steve’s powers of analysis, because the idiot reaches out to touch it and as he does, even though nothing seems to happen straight away, Bucky grabs hold of his other arm and says, “No-!” and then-

It happens very quickly, all at once. First, there is nothing there. And then there’s a shape, and then there’s a figure that is identifiably human, and fucking hell, whatever Steve’s gotten them into this time is fucked up-

And then there’s a view into a room.

Suddenly, there’s music pouring out from the room, and the figure looks up from where they’re playing with some dials on a high-tech looking machine. The music pounds in the background, loud enough to shake the floor of the forest, and the person in the room looks up at them with interest.

Steve’s mouth falls open and stays fallen open, so Bucky takes a second to straighten his jaw. “What- what is this?”

Steve’s mouth stays open, and his entire body feels like it’s about to slump against Bucky’s, and-

God, this is it, this is the 'soulmate' moment for Steve, the one he’s only read about in books and shitty fiction, the kind of thing that only happens to princesses and- and people like Steve, apparently-

“Oh, uh,” says the figure. Masculine, fairly built on the upper body, covered in engine grease. He says, “This is ‘Work Bitch’, by Britney Spears.”

And Bucky’s ears prick up.

He realizes that yes, this is in fact ‘Work Bitch’, by Britney Spears.

He is-

Okay. Of everything he expected from Steve’s soulmate? In the few seconds he’d had to form an opinion of what Steve’s soulmate might be like?

He hadn’t expected some buff, angular, well-dressed engineer, and he hadn’t expected a man at that, and he most certainly hadn’t expected to have a soundtrack, and beyond that, he hadn’t expected to be a part of a moment that seemed-

Private.

Which is probably what makes it worse, because-

Well. The guy’s-

“What-“ Bucky starts, and the guy cuts him off.

“What, you don’t like Britney?” He starts and then he just- keeps going- “I know this is an important thing guys, but for real I’m not gonna be able to operate well vis-à-vis the metaphysical connection thing if we don’t share a mutual love of Britney, who by the way I have met and would not appreciate being scorned-“

And that’s the rub, Bucky guesses, because when he glances over at Steve he’s got the biggest heart eyes Bucky’s ever seen, but-

Okay, there’s no delicate way to put this, because the guy is looking directly at Steve even as he mouths off at Bucky, and-

Bucky still-

Bucky thinks Steve’s soulmate, with his angular face and short-ish stature and motor-mouth and motor oil slicked skin, Bucky thinks Steve’s soulmate is-

Well.

He doesn’t believe in love at first sight. He doesn’t. He just doesn’t, just can’t, but-

With ‘Work Bitch’ by Britney Spears playing at a million decibels ringing through a forest where he stands in front of his best friends soulmate, Bucky thinks he might believe in it now.


	2. One: Body Ache

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They go back to the clearing, of course they do. And Bucky realises, it's not love. It's _lust._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbeta!d unless somebody shows an interest in betaing, so let me know if you spot anything off!

Bucky immediately stamps down on all of his feelings that he’s ever had, ever. Wasn’t love, couldn’t be love, partly because Bucky wouldn’t know it if it punched him square in the face, and partly because _it couldn’t be love._

And as he takes a deep, slow, breath, he realises that yeah, this wasn’t love.

The man in front of him looks like-

Yeah, Bucky cringes. This wasn’t love at all. It was something else, something he doesn’t want to put a word to. He-

Maybe if he doesn’t put a word to it, it would go away by itself.

“What,” says the man. “Are you- I’m not turning it off, you know, I’m not gonna lay my heart on the line-“

“Can you,” starts Steve. He tries again, louder this time, trying to be heard above the pounding bass. “ _Can you turn it down, though? Like a little?”_

The man’s mouth twists into something like agreement crossed with mild disappointment. “C’mon, guys, this is an important metaphysical event, you want to ruin my Britney-based plans? I don’t-“ He catches Bucky’s raised eyebrows and Steve’s wince, finally, and says, “Okay, whatever, the volume goes down. JARVIS?” He calls, and the volume turns itself down, somehow.

Steve and Bucky share a look.

“What? C’mon, guys! It’s good, like, really good, and I don’t need your permission to turn it back up- or over to a different Britney song, she’s an _icon-_ “

Steve holds out his hands, placating, at the same moment Bucky crosses his. “Hey, hey, take a _breath_ , man. What-“

The man opens his mouth to keep talking, then seems to look directly at Bucky’s raised eyebrows again. “Okay, sure. I’ll play ball.” His hands visibly start to fidget as he stops talking, click-clacking the thick silver ring he has on one finger against the metal of his watch. “Anyway,” he starts, slower this time. “Who, uh. Who’re you?”

“I’m, um.” And Bucky knew Steve was a hopeless romantic, and there was a degree to which he always had, but for Steve to know that motormouth-engineer-man was his soulmate and then regain his composure from apparently crossing over into a different dimension within the space of twenty seconds? Bucky’s clasps at Steve’s shoulder from behind. “I’m Steve Rogers, and this is-”

“I’m Bucky,” he offers, waving his hand.

The man’s eyes widen. “I’m- Tony, hi, can I- hey, I’m an,” he takes a deep breath and taps his ring against his watch again. “Hi. I’m an engineer, can I- can I get a closer look at that arm of yours?”

Bucky flexes his fingers, looks from Steve to Tony and back, through the black-edged portal that hung in the middle of a forest clearing, and then at the metal reality that was his functional arm. It wasn’t, like, pretty, but it was alright, it worked.

Bucky looks up at Tony, quizzically. “You’re an engineer? Like, biomedical, or-“

Tony makes a small noise. “I’m most types of engineer.” And the ring and the watch tap double-time out into the background of Britney Spears. That- okay, the guy’s hot? But however interdimensional portals worked, Bucky knew one _hundred_ percent that he did not want to be passing his part-plastic, part-metal arm through it.

“O-kay, no. It’s my _arm._ ”

Tony’s hands immediately retract, instead hanging behind his body as his fingers presumably tap together.

(A really, secretive part of Bucky acknowledges that all the position does is highlight his biceps, which is terrible on many, many levels.)

“Eh,” he says, flippantly, “Your loss, I guess.” He stretches backward, visibly popping joints and muscles through a languid pose that makes him look like an animal in the sunlight. Bucky abruptly has to close his jaw, because this was fucking silly, and this was _Steve’s soulmate._ His teeth clack together, and Steve shoots him a look.

“You okay, Buck?”

“What?” Bucky asks, because there was nothing in this world that would make him admit that the guy was hot.  “Yeah, ‘m fine,” he says, adjusting his stance a little, arms crossed still and legs spread to try and-

God knew what he was trying to do. Was he posing, or something? For what?

He has to bite back something in his head that says that this could be some TV trick, some opportunity to get one up on him; it had been Steve’s idea and although he could be an asshole he’d never do _that._   Still, he maintains his posture, arms crossed and legs spread shoulder width-apart. A twig crunches under his shifting feet.

“So,” says Tony, after a few seconds of silence. “You’re _hugely_ nervous, huh,”

“Thanks, I try,” retorts Bucky, which seems to be the correct response because motor-mouth laughs.

Tony reclines a little, one hand against a low work-counter in a room that Bucky is only just now registering as a lab, or a mechanics garage, or something. “So,” he says, “What do you guys, like, _do?”_

Steve blinks. “I’m an art major.”

“Oh,” says Tony, fingers suddenly up to his mouth and tapping there instead. “What- what do you mean, like fine art? Or like illustration, or graphic design-“

“Oh,” Steve blinks. “I do- I do mostly fine art, right now, but I do illustration, and I want to get into education.”

Tony makes a face when he says ‘fine art’, Bucky notices. “That’s cool, though, fine art is cool! Pretty restrictive, though, I’ve heard?”

Steve blinks.

“Yeah,” Tony says, cracking his knuckles as a non-descript pop-song plays in the background. “I dunno, I’ve always felt like- like if they said we couldn’t work on cars, or if they said we couldn’t code fun shit, I wouldn’t be down for that, and it’s the same sort of principle, right? Where it’s all high-brow and-”

 “Yes!” laughs Steve, a little breathlessly, swaying just a touch under the sunlight that’s starting to filter through the canopy. “That’s exactly the problem! Everyone thinks it has to be formal, and I _know_ that I need a basis in the fine stuff but-”

 “Hey, you do you, but I learnt to build cars by playing with _toys_ , first, not by making engines from scratch.”

 “Yeah! Yeah, I… Yeah.” Bucky wants to smack himself in the face. Steve is fucking smitten. “I got to college off my own steam anyway,” he continues.  “I don’t want to be doin’ stuff I don’t want to do, you know? But I gotta just, I have to get the better degree for now, and then I can do my own thing. Duty calls, you know?”

 Tony makes a face. “I dunno dude, you gotta do what you _want_ -“

 Steve raises an eyebrow at Tony, and god, Bucky is going to burst into flames right then and there, witnessing this moment must be some kind of sin- “I think the saying is ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ isn’t it?”

 “Eh,” says Tony, again, and Bucky is already learning that there appears to be some secret body-language code with Tony, because he’s shifting again, one arm braced on the worktop and the other curled in to tap at his arm. “Tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to, you know?” Steve laughs softly at that, and Tony smiles, and then before Steve can respond, says, “What about you, Bucky? You a student?”

 “Yeah. I, uh. I’m a literature major.”

 “Oooh!” delights Tony, “Do we have a cunning linguist on our hands?” He says, waggling his eyebrows.

 He pauses.

 Steve’s stifling laughter, and Bucky’s face is fucking _burning._

 “What, that wasn’t that funny-?” He says, then whirls around at a noise Bucky can’t here. “Oh, hey Pep! Yeah, I’m- no, I’m doing-“ He pulls a face. “I can _so_ call it _doing science_ , this is like, my third degree and I can call it what I- _Pep, no, don’t come in, I’m naked-_ “

 And as a flash of orange hair swishes into view, far behind Tony, he looks at the screen and grins. “Duty calls, boys, ciao-ciao!”

 And he fiddles with a dial, and then he’s… gone.

So Bucky and Steve stare at each other.

 “Okay,” says Steve. “He’s- quite something,”

 Bucky blinks at him. When Steve doesn’t say anything else, he returns, “He sure is,” and that’s that.

 

***

 

Hiking back, all Steve can talk about is Tony, and Bucky has to bury his newfound lust for just a second, because-

 Well. They’ve only just _met_ the guy. He seemed reasonable (if mouthy), but to be honest, Bucky couldn’t decide if he even _liked_ someone weeks after the fact, and Steve seemed to be putting an awful lot of faith in a sign that just happened to say the word _soulmate._

 “C’mon, Bucky, that’s not fair- he could really be my soulmate!”

 “Yeah,” mumbles Bucky. “But he could easily _not_ be. Listen, Steve, I don’t want to fuck with your bubble-”

 “You’re not fuckin’ with my bubble, I’m just _positive,_ okay-?”

 “But _please_ be careful? He could be a- a-” Bucky coughs. “He could be an interdimensional catfish or something, you know? There’s not like a rulebook on dating interdimensionally, is there-?”

 Steve comes to a sharp stop ahead of him, and Bucky has to perform shitty acrobatics to prevent them _both_ falling over. “You did that _deliberately,_ you gremlin-”

 Steve takes an audible, slow breath. Then he turns around and Bucky is once again confronted with the truth that, Steve? _Not_ a small guy, anymore. Big guy. Very big guy, about as big as Bucky, and Bucky had a _sports_ scholarship.

 “I get where you’re comin’ from, Buck. Don’t get me wrong, I do, but-” Steve grasps hold of Bucky’s arms, and then bites his lip. “I know you’re not- you’re not about the, the commitment, I get that but-”

 “Steve-”

 “I _get_ it, but this could be _it-_ ”

 “Dude, you don’t _know_ this guy! He could be as bad as I am-” which hurts a little bit to say, for some reason that he can’t quite put his finger on.

 “Maybe! Maybe you’re right but, Bucky, I gotta fuckin’ try, right?”

 “Steve,” he exhales and tries to rid his body of all the tension he hadn’t noticed he’d been accumulating. “I don’t want you to get hurt, alright?”

 And ain’t that some shit.

 “Look, Buck, I’m trying to do good for myself, okay? What else am I meant to do?”

 And that’s not something he can argue with, really, because Steve is his _best friend_. In the world, probably.

 Bucky exhales again, deeply, gently, and thinks about the reality of this situation.

 “Okay, can I just- say some things?”

 Steve purses his lips. Clearly biting at the inside of his mouth, he releases his hold on Bucky’s arms and leans back.

 “Okay,” Steve parrots, and visibly relaxes himself.

 “First, I understand why you- I think that if he is your soulmate, goddamn fair play, and I’ll back off and let you- do your thing.”

 Steve opens his mouth to protest, at something, but Bucky holds up his hand, and Steve clearly has to force himself to stop.

 “Second, if you want to get to know this guy, who is for all intents and purposes a _stranger_ , you’re not going to do it alone.”

 Steve blinks.

 “It’s like- I wouldn’t let you lift weights without a spotter, would I?”

 Steve blinks again, and his eyes catch the sunlight in a way that makes them seem very, very blue.

 “And third- look, I’ll let you do your thing. But- he’s from a different _dimension.”_

“Ah, yes, I… yeah,” he mumbles.

 “And that’s-“ Bucky starts and is unsure where he’ll end, because as far as he knew that was just… beyond _doable._ Like that was- crushingly _impossible._

 “Can I- talk now?”

 Bucky sighs, yet again. He swears he’s sighed more often in the past few minutes than he had in the past year, and it didn’t look like the never-ending stream of bullshit was going to end here. “Sure.”

 “It doesn’t matter that he’s from another dimension, but- I will admit that I don’t know him. At all.”

 “That’s a start,” offers Bucky. “At least.”

 “So would- would you come with me? Again, I mean- we could look for your soulmate too-“

 “Nah, I’m not looking for a soulmate.” Which is true. “I’ll, um. I’ll go with you, though.”

 Immediately, alarm bells are ringing in his brain. Bad move, stupid move, not-good move, bad, take it back-

 But Steve’s smiling at him like he’s just provided the secrets of the universe in an easy package. “Thanks, Buck. I owe you one.”

 His eyes are lit up, and his body is loose, and Bucky’s brain is melting out of his ears.

What the _fuck_ did he think he was doing? His best friend and- this fucking hot asshole, who lived in a different _dimension?_

Oh god, things were going to get worse before they got better.

 When they finally reach the car, he can’t help but-

 Well. Tony was a hot dude, and it was clear that-  He has to shake himself. So was Steve, _Steve_ was hot, someone being hot didn’t mean a damn thing about whether Bucky was interested in them.

 People being hot had _nothing_ to do with whether he was interested in them.

 It _didn’t._

 

***

He’s trying not to think about it.

 Bucky can’t seem to avoid the events of the clearing.  He’s reminded of them, all the time, by Steve or by fucking _Britney Spears,_ and there’s-

 There’s something about this guy, this engineer, Tony. It’s not like, love. It’s far from it, as far as Bucky can tell, it’s- _something._ Something he isn’t putting words to _._ Bucky… isn’t going to think about it. At all. He shoves it away, shakes his head and blinks a few times. Tony, probably because he was so… unobtainable, had become a part of Bucky that was a dirty secret. Quiet, closed away, cold. Bucky keeps his thoughts to himself. In the realest sense of the word, Tony was exactly that. _Unobtainable._ No one night stands were in the future for them, not least because Tony and Steve were meant to be together, but also because of the whole dimensional-portal thing, and because for the love of _god,_ Bucky values his friendship with Steve. Steve was good, naive, _real_ , in the way most people weren’t. He was someone that had always been a part of Bucky, stalwart and scrappy, and-

 All he could talk about was Tony.

 He talked about him in the abstract sense, in the same way Bucky would talk about his future partner, if he ever decided to settle down.  Steve talked about simple shit, like the way Tony would write. He talked about how Tony could probably draw, too, and how he’d need to if he was an engineer. He talked about how he’d looked, physically, and wondered whether he played sport like Bucky did, or if he worked out in parks like Steve did.

 It’s all _questioning,_ and Bucky starts to wonder if they’d ever go back to that clearing. It seemed pretty clear Steve _wanted_ to, but-

 Bucky was a patient man. But there was only so much lovey-dovey shit he could deal with, especially when-

 Steve mentions it, and he feels his face burning. He feels his face burst into bright white flames, in fact, because Steve asks, “do you think he’s gay?”, and all Bucky can think to say is-

 “I don’t think about him at all.”

 The effect that has is multiple. On the one hand, Steve raises an eyebrow at him, and looks thoroughly unimpressed as he says, “Really, Buck?”

 On the other hand, Bucky has just  been fucking discovered. It’s been three days since they met, and- and that’s not long enough to develop an obsession, surely, especially not when he’s _not thinking about it at all,_ and-

 He can’t break Steve’s heart. Beyond anything, beyond anything at all, he can’t do that, never would. Could never stand to see him in pain, even just- even just when it was Bucky coaching Steve in the early days, he couldn’t do it.

 So he raises an eyebrow right back at Steve, face flushed and hot. “Sure. He’s _your_ soulmate, isn’t he?”

 Bucky’s throat closes up, clenching and spasming as he coughs. Steve claps him on the back, and just when he _hopes_ this whole- whatever-it-was- has been forgotten, Steve says: “Sure, but you’re gonna have to get along, aren’t you?”

 Bucky smiles between heaving breaths from his coughing fit. “Sure. And we will,” he placates, breathing through his nose.

 “Mm’kay,” Steve says, tone light. “Well, at least try to get along with him, okay?”

 And so Bucky keeps heaving breaths and tries not to think about it.

 

***

 

The second trip to the clearing is louder than the first.  They bustle about each-other, chatting less about their love lives and more about the break to the beach they’d been planning, and how Bucky was going to borrow his pal’s surfboard, and how it was _finally_ going to be the right weather for Steve to earn money doing sketches of people.

 And when they get there, Tony is already there, sitting in his- lab? Garage?- Playing with something.

 He doesn’t look up from the screen as they approach, even though their footfalls must make _some_ noise. There’s music in the background this time too, but it’s different, more guitars and more clanging drums.

 They stand in front of the portal in the same way they had before, Steve in front and Bucky behind, arms crossed as Steve’s rest by his side.Steve’s comfortable, Bucky notes, posture relaxed and smile on his face.

 Suddenly, Tony’s eyes flick up from his screen, and it’s like a light-bulb switching on. He’s in motion, inherently, limbs stretching and body flexing. Bucky looks around at the clearing, which was as empty as it had been before, aside from the portal, and reckons that Tony had probably been there a while. It’s a week since they’d last been there, but several hours earlier, and not for the first time, he’s struck by the fact that scientific basis or not, this interdimensional portal stuff was bullshit. Guy was probably in Arkansas or something, chilling in a basement or whatever. There was no way this was a bonafide soulmate portal.

 But then again, Steve’s the most clearly relaxed he’s been in a while, like he has absolute faith and trust that it would be okay. Maybe there was something unusual about that, maybe there wasn’t. Fate was the biggest authority figure of all, really, so something in Steve’s gut must’ve been telling him this was a-okay, which twists in Bucky’s gut as envy.

 Tony finally finishes his stretches, to a chorus of groans that Bucky winces at in the very same moment Steve raises his eyebrows.

 God, something about this guy made them _both_ raise their eyebrows a lot. He was emotive; Bucky had to give him that.

 Tony pauses in his movement, then seems to take a conscious moment of reflection. He hops backward onto the workbench, hiking his legs up and crossing them. “Well hello there,” he says, smiling. “Fancy seeing you here.”

 Bucky ticks that off the list, not that he’s keeping one. A sense of humour was nice, if he was looking for that, which he wasn’t.

 “Morning, Tony,” says Steve.

 Tony blinks. “Morning?” he jumps from the bench, turns around and squints at a wall that stays stubbornly out of focus this side of the portal. “It’s- okay, yeah, it _is_ morning. We’ll go with that. I have- Huh.” He pauses again, half turned away from them.  “JARVIS?” he calls, and Steve starts when a cool voice responds.

 “Yes, sir.” It says, and Bucky laughs, just a little. It’s like Siri, then, but British. “I’m assuming you wish to know when you last slept?”

 Steve’s eyes widen, and he bites his lips to keep from laughing, holding out a hand and gently putting it on his shoulder. “It’s just an upgraded Siri, dude, chill out,” he says quietly, because he didn’t want to fuck up the spectacle of voice recognition.

 “C’mon J, I’m not that bad-” grumbles Tony.

 “I can assure you, sir, that you are in fact, ‘that bad’,” returns the voice. Tony’s looking up into the ceiling, and Bucky squints at it, but all he can see is the same blur that the rest of the room was made of. “You last slept 30 hours ago.”

 Tony blinks. “That’s not bad!” he protests.

 “No, sir, but the average person gets-”

 “Yeah, yeah, whatever, thanks, J,” Tony says, turning back around to face them.

“The _average person_ -” insists the machine. 

“Yeah, _thanks, J!”_ calls Tony.

 Which is pretty cool, if Tony’s upgraded a Siri so much it could _argue_ with him.

 “Anyway,” he says, cool and apparently collected, although now Bucky’s looking for them, he can make out dark circles under his eyes. “What’s up with you guys? Doing good?”

 Bucky winces.

 “Ooh, we have a wince! We have a wincer, ladies and gentlemen,” laughs Tony. “Is it- wait, you were the literature student, weren’t you?”

 Grudging, Bucky nods. “Yep.” he says. It had been a week ago that Tony’d been told that. It makes something in him twinge in a way he immediately stamps down on.

 “Okay, so it was ‘doing good’, right? Instead of ‘doing well’?” tries Tony, as Steve stands between them both, and fuck him, is _visibly_ amused.

 “I’m not an asshole,” Bucky says. “I just _notice_ it.”

 “Eh,” says Tony. “I could take or leave bad coding habits too.”

 Which is… not what Bucky expected him to say.

 And admittedly, it makes it even harder to dislike him. (If Bucky had been keeping a list, which he hadn’t, he’d be ticking off another box right about now.)

 “Anyway,” presses Tony, “Doing _well_ , then?”

 “Sure,” says Steve. “We- we figured we’d come every week or so, if that’s cool with you?”

 Tony shrugs. “I spend most of my time in here anyway, so, sure.”

 Bucky and Steve share another look, and Tony snorts a laugh. When he doesn’t offer anything at their inquisitive looks back at him, Steve shrugs. “Where is ‘here’?” he asks.

 “The lab, it’s- it’s a basement, but I pay higher rent than everyone else to have it, so nobody seems to mind that make so much noise. And- you’ve heard J, he’s installed in the speakers and machinery, and there’s DUM-E and YOU as well. And, and BUTTERFINGERS, too.”

 He throws his hands out, gesturing to the room behind him. “And then there’s all the welding stuff, and the car stuff, and over there’s the-”

 “Tony, we can’t see it,” Steve says.

 Bucky laughs into his hand at the way he says it, though. It’s gently admonishing. Like Steve’ a duck and Tony’s a wayward duckling.

 Then he realises what he’s laughing at and shuts himself up, because woah, not a healthy start for a relationship.

 “Oh,” frowns Tony. “Okay, let me-” he crouches down in front of them, and adjusts some things they can’t see. It does come into focus, though, and quickly. “How about now?”

 “You’re good,” says Bucky, when Steve seems to be busy peering into the portal.

 It’s a fuckin’ big garage. Huge, in fact, bigger than Bucky figures it conceivably should be for a ‘basement’.

 Tony’s staring at Steve; brow furrowed just a little and body reclined against the workbench.

 “So,” tries Bucky. “You’re an engineer?”

 Tony starts, in a way he hadn’t before, when they’d just appeared out of nowhere, presumably. It seems to strike him as odd, somehow, like it’s unusual for Tony to be asked what he does.

 “Well, yeah. Amongst other things. I did my first degree in mechanical engineering. Oh, and,” he gestures out behind him at the garage that’s now in focus. “Robotics. That’s a pretty big thing with me, I like, uh. I like robots. Like J!”

 He smiles, then, in a way Bucky had most definitely not noticed him smiling before. His whole face softens, less sharp, bright. “You wanna- hey, wait.” The smiles not gone, but something more triumphant sidles onto his face. “You thought J was like, Siri, or whatever?”

 Bucky shrugs. “I dunno, neither of us have ever had iPhones.”

 Tony blinks and frowns, so quickly Bucky almost misses it. “But you guys know the premise, right?”

“Sure,” says Steve. “Like an… assistant, right? Like an A.I.?”

 Tony laughs. “Sure,” he parrots. “If you can call Siri that, which would be a vast overstatement of it’s abilities, but like, sure.”

 The cool voice from the ceiling sighs. Which is odd, because that’s not something he’s ever known computers to do. He looks quickly at Steve, whose brow is furrowed and face thoroughly confused.

 “Welcome to the future, boys,” says Tony.

 And just as Bucky understands that ah, yes, this was Tony _showing off_ , the room in front of them explodes into blue.

 It sits there, for a second, before Bucky can really comprehend what it is.

 “Is this-?” He starts, guessing that it’s a new interface or something, a screen projector but interactive, but Steve cuts across him before he can finish.

 “What is this,” he says. “Is this- is it like a projector?”

 “Yep,” says Tony, smugly. “Interactive,” Bucky bites back a smug smile of his own, and then stamps down on literally ever feeling he’s ever had, because goddamn, he could _not_ keep doing this- “But _more_ than that. You probably can’t tell from there; it’s _3D._ JARVIS is a learning computer and a display, and- well. He’s everything.”

 Steve extends a hand towards the portal, and it’s only Bucky’s hand on his shoulder that stops him connecting. Something about the eerie, hanging blackness made him nervous, and the idea of _touching_ it made his skin crawl.

 When Steve looks back at him, frowning, Bucky shrugs. He couldn’t explain a lot of what was happening recently, but if there was anything he knew for sure, it was that he did _not_ want either of them touching that portal.

 “Wise move, Buck,” says Tony. His arms are crossed, his body leaning in towards the portal. “I’ve, uh, I’ve touched it before. Hurts _pretty_ bad. Matter compression, or something. Pretty cool, though, because my hands just went back to normal afterwards, thank fuck, and to be honest I’ve definitely had worst scrapes but fucking _ow,_ we’re talkin’ feedback central, but-” he looks at them, seriously. “I wouldn’t touch it, if I were you.”

 Steve makes a noise in the back of his throat.

 “Not- neither of you are men of many words, huh?” Tony tries, once again fiddling with his ring. The lights blink for a few seconds,  then recede into a little square, which Tony flicks around with his fingers in the palm of his hands.

 Bucky snorts. “You’d be surprised,” he says. “I know he probably doesn’t seem like it, but Steve can be mouthy if you know what I mean-”

 Steve looks from Tony to Bucky to back again, eyebrows raised.

 “You know, I think I kinda do- boy’s got _potential_ , look at him! Beefcake Adonis; there’s always a catch, and maybe we just gotta _shake things up_ to get to it-“ he pauses. “And then there’s you, tall and dark and whatever, and-” Tony puts a hand to his face. “Hey, you’re not like- assholes, are you?”

 “What?” asks Steve. This guy, Tony, was clearly a goddamn handful. Not like- this wasn’t like the calm and quiet future Steve had always wanted at all. He was energetic, frenetic, almost, even down to the way he fiddles with the blue cube in his hands as they talk.

 “What?” Returns Tony. “Can’t blame a guy for asking, can you?”

 “No, but it’s still a bit…” Steve visibly struggles with the words.

 “High-key?” Suggests Bucky.

 “High-key!” Steve repeats. “Yeah, how about- okay. We’re not assholes,” he starts, and Bucky almost laughs at Tony’s face, which is somewhere between a smile and confusion. “I’m an art student, I sketch people in my spare time, and I work out in my spare-spare time. I, uh. I like dogs? I like the beach,” he tries. “We’re just- people, I guess, not… not assholes.”

“Huh,” says Tony. “You’re right. You don’t seem like assholes.” And he seems satisfied with that. 

“How do we know _you’re_ not a dick?” Bucks asks, smiling.

“That’s a valid question,” he says, leaning with one arm on the workbench again. God, man was _fluid_ , almost like an animal in the way he stretched. “I guess- I dunno. I like charity, I guess? I give money where I can, and I’ve made-” he nods in Bucky’s direction. “I’ve made prosthetics, and stuff, before, but they always end up too heavy for most people.” He picks up what looks like a green protein shake from the side, and takes a drink, before languidly gesturing with it. “Big fan of green energy, as well, and but, uh, honestly? Can’t beat a big engine.”

Steve looks at Bucky, some great meaning laden heavy on his face, but damn if Bucky knows what the fuck he’s trying to insinuate.

“That’s cool,” says Bucky, which is an understatement, and he’s viscerally aware of the way Steve is staring at him. “So-“

“So,” continues Tony. “I’m a futurist, philanthropist, play-”

“So you…” Steve gestures to the workshop behind him. “You built all this?”

Tony smiles, clenching his fingers against the blue square in his hand. “Well, yeah. Cool, right?”

Steve grins. “And so modest.”

Tony laughs. “Modesty? Who’s she?” He takes another drink of protein shake. “Never heard of her.”

That pulls a laugh from Steve. And Tony seems ever-more smug, ever more aware of the fact that he seems to be in his element, down in a lab surrounded by machinery and now, Bucky and Steve. And something in Bucky twitches.

Tony smiles even wider, and he and Steve start talking. The few words Bucky catches are about Tony’s degree, or _degrees_ , apparently, but his world is slowly narrowing down to just him and the clearing and two figures of static.

 

It’s… Bucky is not in love, because this was Steve’s soulmate, of all people. But something in him?

 

Something in him wanted to rail Steve’s soulmate against a fucking _wall._

 

It's not _love,_  he realises.

 

It's lust.

 

Something in his face must change, because God knew he could feel his insides shrivelling up, there are stones in his gut and in his heart and a cracking whip in his brain, this was _not allowed-_

 

Bucky stamps down on everything he’s ever held dear and Steve grabs him by the shoulder and says “Bucky? Y’alright?”

 

And so Bucky glances up and his face must look like he feels, because Steve uses his other hand and grabs him with that, too.

 

“Yeah,” he chokes out. “I’m fine I just have to-”

 

He just has to _breathe,_ take a moment to contextualise this, put it in a box deep, deep down where nobody would ever find it-

 

“I just-”

 

“Hey, hey,” says Tony. “Y’alright?”

 

And suddenly Bucky is quite viscerally angry. At everything. His insides crease up into tight little knots, and his head splits into an ache.

 

“Yeah,” he spits. “Fuckin’ _fantastic._ ”

 

Tony looks visibly confused, and Bucky thinks, _good._

 

“We gotta go,” he says to Steve, and if he spares a glance in Tony’s direction and sees him looking straight back, perplexed, then he doesn’t think about it.

 

When Steve asks him what the fuck had happened back there, he doesn’t think about an answer. He doesn’t stay awake at night, thinking about the whole situation.

 

And when Steve asks him to go back to the clearing, he sure as fuck doesn’t say _yes._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know if you'd like to see more of this! I have a plot planned out now, but I'd like to know how this is going down before I actually start writing it!


	3. Two: Toy Soldier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky figures out how the hell he's meant to be feeling, and everyone around him sort of rolls with it.
> 
> (Bucky has a dream that might make him a bad person.)
> 
> [[This chapter is NSFW]].

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's probably ways to write Bucky so he doesn't come across 100% emotionally conflicted, but I sure don't know it. Also, I'm considering adding another section to this chapter! I'll let y'all know if I change things up.

Natasha sits him down with a glare and a cup of green tea in her hands.

“What are you doing?” She asks, seriously. Accusingly.

He hadn’t been with Steve to the clearing in two weeks. Steve had gone with Sam, instead, and once with Natasha, and Tony hadn’t shown up. In fact, there was no evidence of the portal at all, apparently, just dead space where there should have been a warm black gap in the fabric of space.

Bucky is-

He’s not sure how to feel about that. Maybe his outburst had scared Tony off, somehow, but he doubted that: motor-mouth had seemed like he was made of sterner stuff. Maybe it was _fate,_ for Tony to not actually be Steve’s soulmate-

He kicks himself. Bad, fuckin’ idiot. Gotta reign in that cynical streak, Barnes, gotta take a _breath_ or end up like-

Like-

He’s thinking of Tony again, and for just that he feels like kicking himself again. Idiot.

“Bucky _Barnes,”_ says Nat, fingers snapping in front of his face. “ _What_ are you _doing_?” she repeats.

“I dunno,” he says, slowly. “Writing an essay?” which wasn’t _untrue,_ it was just that he’d been staring at the same blank screen for an hour and had chewed his pen to bits.

“You know what I mean,” she says, slowly, carefully. She’s picking her words carefully, he suddenly notices, like she’s biting something back.

“I-“ Natasha sighs. “I’m _asking_ about the whole thing with Steve’s…” But she seems to stumble over the word, “Soulmate,” she finishes, a little falteringly.

His mouth clacks shut and his brows drop. “What thing with Steve’s soulmate?”

Nat narrows her eyes. “Barnes, I’ve known you long enough to know when you’re lying through your teeth, you know _exactly_ what I’m talking about-“

“I _don’t-_ “ he protests.

“Okay. Okay,” she says, putting her mug on the table and splaying her fingers wide over her knees. “So I’m gonna recount the story I know, and you’re going to chime in when you think you fucked up, okay?”

Bucky purses his lips and bites at the inside of his cheeks.

“So you and Tony went to the portal, and you spoke with Tony, who you were wary of but you liked, and then you said you would _come with Steve,_ like a _spotter_ , every time Steve went to see him, to make _sure_ he wouldn’t be _taken advantage of,_ and then you went back a _second_ time, and you got along fine, until Steve noticed you seemed off, and then you promptly exploded in his face, made him leave, and you drove back in silence.” She pauses. “I’m going to take your silence as an ‘I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, Natasha’.”

He bites the inside of his mouth even harder.

She pauses, then seems to change tack. Her face softens, ever so slightly, and she sighs. He feels it building in his chest like a goddamn hurricane, like a firestorm or a dragon’s breath. “I mean to say that even aside from Steve being upset, we’re _worried_ about you, Bucky. We-“

“ _I can’t help it if I hate the guy!”_ He blurts.

And it- God, it makes his insides twitch and convulse, the way it slips from his lips like it’s _fact,_ because Nat seems taken aback, and he heaves a breath and then sighs and…

“What am I....” he chews his lips. “What am I meant to do?”

 Nat looks _really_ taken aback then, as if she hadn’t expected to actually get an answer.

“You hate him?”

“Yeah,” he tries, just to see how it feels on his lips.

And that’s the story he’s sticking with.

 

***

 

There’s flooding in the room, music swelling and brain fuzzy-warm, life slow in his pupils, and he breathes in, one-two, one-two-

There he is, the man of his fucking dreams, splayed across the bed in a way that makes him fucking drool; all mouthy and ready to start rambling. He’s spread with limbs akimbo, and Bucky blinks and then there’s something over his eyes, and the man in the bed in front of him keens out a deep and breath-y noise.  Bucky’s on top of him, then, biting softly into the flesh of his shoulder as he flails and grips tight to Bucky’s much larger body. They kiss and it’s sloppy, wet against his cheeks and lips as he presses a thigh into Bucky’s crotch.

“I always wanted you, you know, always did,” says Tony, “Even when-”

Tony breathes something that is absolutely not allowed, he says, “Even when you pretended to prefer Steve to me-”

And then there’s someone else, blonde, Bucky recognises him, because normally in Bucky’s dreams it’s him in place of Tony, and Steve says, “What the _fuck, Bucky, you were s’posed to be my friend-”_

Bucky rears backwards, skittering across the room until he’s standing in front of Steve, fully clothed and hands out like claws. “Please, god, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“ _I hate you,”_ damns Steve, and he wakes up with a hard-on and heart rate so fast he can feel it on his tongue.

He breathes, once and then twice, sighs it all out.

He’s never going to sleep again.

 

 

***

He doesn’t meet up with Steve to go to the clearing that week, either. This time Steve goes by himself, and he feels that fact grate on his nerves.

Bucky was being an _asshole._

 

***

 

He can’t avoid Steve forever, though, and when Steve rocks up in a suit he remembers in a crash of thunder that he had agreed they would go to an exhibition together. Courtesy of one of Steve’s friends, one that he didn’t know, holding a party where he could just… sit back with Steve, Nat and her friend. He’d been invited because he’d had a deadline.

It was, according to Steve, a celebration.

 Leaning back on his heels,  he takes a deep breath and lets Steve dress him in a suit, too.

“You forgot?” Steve says, conversationally, arms crossed and facing across the room as Bucky changes.

“Not deliberately,” he responds, and that’s true.  He feels cagey, rattled by his own assholery. Bucky couldn’t even say for sure if Steve had reminded him about the exhibition: he tries desperately to remember, but whenever he does he thinks heavy-handedly of his own situation. It’s selfish, definitely. If there was somehow a key to making thoughts stop, though, Bucky didn’t know it.

Silence tails them, boxed in by Steve’s occasional attempts at conversation.

“How was the deadline?”

“Okay,” he replies. “I’ve passed the module I think.”

“That’s good!” Steve says. “That’s… good. Proud of you, Buck.”

“Thanks,” he returns, and he would say something more but his guts have turned to coiled wires and his mouth a fucking _serpent,_ because he was going to have to come clean.

He didn’t hate Tony, and he didn’t want Steve to get hurt, but he couldn’t just look the man in the eye and pretend he’d not been dreaming about him-

Though, Bucky supposed, he’d done that with Steve. And that had at least mostly worked, up until now.

 

***

 

They walk along the river together, headed for the party that Steve’s been invited to, this exhibition. It’s someplace fancy, and  Bucky’s suddenly very aware that they’re both wearing as close to fancy as they own.

“Nat’ll be there,” Steve tries.

“Oh,” mumbles Bucky, face alight and body trembling, tense. It’s a sharp moment where he realises he’s being quite genuinely a dick, a cause for concern if nothing else, so he shakes out his limbs one step at a time and tries again. “That’s cool, who’s she coming with?” 

“Clint… someone. I dunno, I’ve not met him, but she said he was in town specially!”

“Nat’s friend Clint?” Bucky furrows his brow. “Archery team seems familiar?”

“Mm,” agrees Steve. “He’s meant to be nice, I’ve heard. Out-of-town type, though, doesn’t like cities. Allegedly.”

Bucky snorts. “Allegedly?” he parrots. “He’s Nat’s friend, not a sordid celebrity.” He peers at Steve, quick as he can, and notes that Steve’s staring over the river. “Anyway,” he finishes. “He seems like a good dude. Would be nice to finally meet him.”

Steve sneaks a glance over at him, and Bucky pretends he hasn’t noticed, and then they walk in silence.

He breathes deeply and physically relaxes his shoulders, reminds himself that Steve was doing him a _favour,_ the opportunity to let his hair down post-essay. He drags his fingers through his hair.

It had made sense when he’d agreed to go, probably over a month ago, and definitely before Tony. But it didn’t make sense now.

Steve sighs, suddenly. “Bucky-” he starts, and Bucky can feel his hackles rising again, and he wonders when this became something so _beyond_ him. “Listen, I don’t wanna be a dick…”

And there’s suddenly a snarl sitting on his tongue but he bites it back. He’s been doing a lot of that, recently. God knew how Steve was dealing with it, Bucky was being obnoxious even to _himself._

“I know you don’t like him,” says Steve, and Bucky, fuck sake, he just _nods,_ as if this is fine, as if _any_ of this is fine. “But I just think you need to get to know him-”

“Steve,” he says, plain as he can as his jaws clack together and brain judders between reverse and overdrive. “ _You_ don’t know him. You’ve only seen him when I’m there-”

“And I don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to do-”

“But you need to ask a favour.” Bucky finishes for him, biting at the inside of his cheeks. “Yeah. I guessed so,” he mumbles when Steve nods gently.

“Look, I just- I need you to come with me, alright?” His hands drag through his hair and Bucky takes a deep breath, before stopping dead in his tracks and staring at Steve. “I know that it’s not fair of me to ask, but the portal hasn’t opened other than with you…”

“You think it might be-” And god knows how he was planning on finishing that sentence, because it trails off into the night like a cat slinking away from a fight.

“I think its… I dunno, Buck, maybe the interdimensional gods _like_ you or some shit,” he half-sighs it out in a noise that sounds equal parts like laughter and like exasperation.

“Sure,” he says, “I buy that,” and he’s fighting back some impulse again, because he’s stood next to Steve and his hair is messy and he blinks, and for just a second Steve’s eyes seem so _blue._ They seem cold and warm at once, and slowly Bucky reaches out a hand and smooths Steve’s hair back into place with fingers that tremble ever so slightly.

If Steve notices it, he doesn’t say anything, but his breath comes out just-so, briefly faster and deeper than Bucky’s heard it in a while.

And Steve stares at him, eyes _still so blue,_ and Bucky says, “Okay,” without even bidding it.

Steve makes a noise in the back of his mouth, so Bucky clears his throat and shuffles his feet. “I’ll, uh,”

Steve snaps to attention, hair now back in place and body infinitely still, all of a sudden.

A jogger passes them on the path.

“I’ll go,” he mumbles.

“Huh?” Steve returns, mouth still slightly open.

“I’ll, uh. I’ll go.”

“Oh.” he says, and then when their eyes meet again he seems to startle. “Oh!”

Bucky doesn’t think about that moment again.

Not in so many words, anyway.

 

***

 

The hike to the clearing is gentle. They talk about the art exhibition the night before, how people had schmoozed and drunk far too much because they’d assumed the bar was open, and then been kicked out when it had become rampantly clear that not one of Steve’s friends could afford the prices they were actually charging. It seems normal, somehow, even though this is only the third time they’d been to the clearing together, and when silence falls it is companionable, not harsh.

The exhibition was fun, in the end, partly because they’d finally met Clint, and whilst Bucky was a fish out of water at an art show, he’d sure as fuck never seen anyone quite as out of their element as Clint. 

“Are they together?” muses Steve.

Bucky snorts. “ _God_ no. Nat trims her nails on one hand.”

Steve swats at him. “Don’t be so crude.”

Bucky smirks and flicks Steve in the side. “Don’t be such a prude, then, Nat doesn’t care, otherwise she wouldn’t-”

“The way Nat trims her nails _doesn’t_ indicate her- her lesbian-ness-”

Bucky squints at him. “No, but the fact that she says she’s a lesbian sure does. Also-” he snorts back a laugh. “Did you want to say- did you want to say ‘Lesbianity’?”

“Yeah,” he replies, then stops. “Is that a word?”

“I-” Bucky starts. “I have no idea. It sounds like it should be, doesn’t it? Like… like gaiety?”

Steve frowns. “I don’t know, Buck. You’re the Lit student.”

“Mm,” Bucky agrees.

“Didn’t you do a module on Queer Theory?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, again. “But that just teaches you how to analyse text in a _gay_ way. It doesn’t like- it doesn’t teach you neat new lesbian-related vocabulary.”

“Well,” Steve says. “Maybe it should.”

Bucky snorts. “I’ll pass that onto my professor. I’m sure Julia would be _ecstatic_ to hear your constructive criticism-”

“Enough of the sass, Barnes, I’m nervous enough as it is-”

“Look, Steve, if I can pass the year then so can you-”

Steve frowns and swats him. “You know I didn't mean that. I meant about _Tony!_ What if he’s not there-”

“He will be.”

And Bucky doesn’t know _how_ he knows, he just feels it in his gut. He feels it in his bones and in his tongue, in the enamel of his teeth.

It’s a weird kind of surety. He’s not sure he’s ever been this sure of anything before, and it’s odd, because he’s got absolutely no way of knowing whether he’s right or not.

But still, when they get to the clearing, Tony is there. Once again, he’s reclined on the workbench in a way that speaks of feline ease in his surroundings. Bucky steels his ribcage against whatever feeling is brewing in his chest.

“Hey,” says Tony, not looking up from his screen. He taps out something with frenetic fingers before looking up and squinting. The light filters through the trees in beams of brightness, so Tony puts a hand against his eyes and smiles widely. “It’s been a while, huh?”

Then his gaze zeroes in on Bucky. “You okay? You seemed… unwell, when I last saw you?”

Bucky responds with a tight smile. It clings to his teeth and threatens to turn into something real, but he breathes deeply and relaxes himself forcibly. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Still hugely nervous though, right?”

“As always,” Bucky returns. “You know me,” he says, before he realises that actually Tony _didn’t_ know him, and all of this was far too nice given that he was meant to-

Oh, fucking hell, this was not getting any easier. Tony seemed to genuinely _like_ him, and frankly right now Bucky can’t think of anything worse, with his dreams still lingering in his head. He shifts his stance and squares his shoulders, but as Steve glances over at him he realises he has to at least be _nice._

“A-Anyway, how’re you?” he asks, and if his voice trembles, just a little, then no one acknowledges it. 

Tony smiles with an eyebrow raised. “I’m going to ignore the lovers tiff you two have pretty clearly had-” and it must be obvious on his face because Tony holds up his hands even as he taps his feet, and says” “No, no, don’t worry, say no more, your secret is safe with Tony, I won’t tell anyone that you stole the bedcovers last  night-”

“Tony,” cuts in Steve. “We’re not… together.”

(And there’s a very, very, very quiet twinge in his heart.)

“Sure,” agrees Tony, nodding.

Bucky and Steve share a look.

“Anyway, I’m gonna completely change tack from the sore spot that I have apparently hit, and say pretty good, actually! Pep visited, and I got some sleep last night! It was amazing. Have you guys ever tried sleep, because fuck, I would _heartily_ recommend it-”

The bewildering change of subject makes Bucky stifle a laugh at the same time Steve does, and Tony beams wider. “Also,” he adds, “I just got a windfall of followers, and I’m basically _this close_ -” he squints and holds up a hand, finger and thumb tight together, “-to getting verified, I swear.”

“Followers?” asks Steve, which is surprising- though it shouldn’t be, really. Steve might not know a lot about technology, but he was infinitely curious about it, and smart enough to learn even though he couldn’t afford the gadgets most people had. Steve was clever, in that way, strategic. If he had to know something, he would just… know it. Surprising as well that he didn’t want to press the issue that they weren’t… together.

Somehow, hits some kind of nerve in his spine, forces him to stand to attention, makes him think he’s on the edge of some unseen breakthrough.

Steve doesn’t seem to feel the same though, because when Bucky looks over at him he’s looking at Tony with interest.

“Mm,” says Tony, absent-mindedly tapping with his leg. “On Twitter. It’s good fun, gives me a place to chat shit where it’s anonymous. Nobody would’ve thought I was _Iron Man_. I think they think it’s a PR stunt, or something, like- you remember Horse eBooks?”

Steve blinks, and Bucky does too. “What the fuck is a horse ebook?” Steve asks.

“Huh. Okay, maybe it wasn’t as popular as I thought it was. But, yeah, there was an account that- It doesn’t matter, it was just funny. Maybe look into it!” He says, brightly. And here’s the thing.

Bucky makes a mental note of the words “Iron Man”, and Twitter, and the anonymity of it, at the very same time that he notes that there was _no way_ they could possibly find someone on Twitter _interdimensionally._

But he makes a note of it anyway.

He’s reminded, viscerally, of all the insistence that he _hates_ the man in front of him. He’s not sure what he feels anymore, but it is most certainly not hate, that _is_ for sure.

Bucky stands back and lets Steve and Tony chat.

For once in his goddamn life, he feels like a missing puzzle piece: they all match, coordinate. There’s no space for comfortable silence, but it doesn’t seem like Tony’s trying too hard to spur the conversation on. It seems like words come naturally to him, as naturally as hard work came to Steve or- or stamping down on his emotions came to Bucky.

He makes a mental note that this was okay, and he was allowed to _like_ Tony.

He just wasn’t allowed to fuck him. And you know what? Bucky could manage that.

He could totally, totally manage that.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!! 
> 
> I would really appreciate some feedback on this story, I'm trying to finish it before the end of my summer break!! Always helps to have a bit of motivation. 
> 
> As always, you can find me at @ [ verulams ](http://verulams.tumblr.com) and I'm always looking for people interested in beta!ing!


	4. Three: Coupure Electrique

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky has some more dreams, and gets to grips with Twitter. Natasha has some words. 
> 
> [[This chapter is NSFW]]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heres some emotions for you

The soft-slight sway of the world around him and the gentle-quiet hum of the floor ooze into his head. There’s some kind of music playing, maybe, not that he can tell: his head feels like cotton candy, saccharine and over-sweet, smoothing over his brain like concrete and plaster in an avant-garde art piece. 

There’s Tony, again, folded over on the bed. His legs are up, on display, and he’s more tanned than Bucky expected- his skin looks golden against Bucky’s fingers, and he looks at once both bigger and smaller than he had through the portal. His fingers, where he’s holding onto Bucky’s, are lithe and thin, but he’s very clearly muscular. Where Bucky grabs onto his thighs, his own fingers meet harsh cords of muscle before it all blends out and turns to soft, soft skin.

(Something about that doesn’t strike Bucky as quite right, because even though Tony was clearly pretty short, he was an mechanical engineer, built stocky and top-heavy.)

 The realisation jabs at his consciousness, and he notices, all of a sudden, that this Tony doesn’t have the _hair_ he’d been expected. He was paler, paler, paler still, until Bucky look up and there’s Steve instead of Tony and Bucky’s mouth drops open because this time there’s a knock at the door-

 “Don’t come _in_ -” he screeches, but before he’s even finished talking Tony is standing behind him and he howls out a scream as Tony crosses his arms and it becomes rampantly clear that Steve-

 Steve shoves away from him, arms flailing, and Tony stares at the scene in front of him with increasingly contorted features.

 “How _could_ you-?” He says, and then Steve says it, and then they both say it together. “How _could you?!”_

And not for the first time that week, Bucky wakes in a cold sweat with a twitching dick and his whole soul on fire.

 

***

 

He goes back to hating Tony. It’s much easier, in all honesty, because it’s the opposite of a middle ground. It’s far easier to act the part of Steve’s bodyguard than it is to be his _friend._

 Whenever he looks at Tony, he feels his heart rate kick up a fraction of a percent. Whether that’s because of terror or attraction, he doesn’t know. Could be either, really.

 “Still hugely nervous, right?” Tony asks, when they visit the next time. Bucky stands back, and just nods in response.

 When Tony raises an eyebrow and smiles, he realises that it could be both terror _and_ attraction at once.

 

***

 

Steve laughs at something Tony says, and all the lines on his face ease out into something like easy contentment. His whole being shudders back and forth, easy and loose, his arms uncross and his shoulders shake. Tony shoots him a look that he’s not sure he’s meant to catch. It’s gentle, soft and calm, and although Bucky’s stood at the back of the clearing with arms clenched to his sides and earphones in, he breathes a little easier for it.

 

***

 

“So tell me, Barnes,” says Nat. She’s in his room, once again clutching a cup of what looks like green tea. Could be anything, though, given that it was Nat’s deadline season. Could’ve been gin, for all Bucky knew. “How’s the deadline going?”

 “It’s going… well.” He responds, and fumbles with his laptop screen for a second, before turning it towards her. True to his last-minute form, he’d only managed to write a single word. It wasn’t even a good word, but with over a week until the actual deadline date, it was basically impossible to motivate himself. He’d done nothing but stare at the screen all day, and he was absolutely not ready to start imposing a reward system just yet. It was a week away, and the essay was only two thousand words, he had bags of time.

 She snorts. “That’s positive, I guess. Good call on starting the essay with ‘in’, by the way, rather than ‘the’.”

 Bucky smirks at her, moving the laptop back to face him. “Thanks, I try.”

 “I’m sure you do,” she says, adjusting her legs crossed beneath her. She’s perched on Bucky’s bed, and it makes irritating creaking noises whenever she shifts, but there were worse things in life than creaky beds.

 Like the whole… Tony situation, for example.

 She, as always, appears to read his mind. God knew how Nat knew the things she did, but she sure did _know_ them. “So,” she starts, tone dropped and face carefully blank.

He sighs and shuts his laptop screen.  “What,” he says.  It’s not a question, but not a statement either. It’s anticipatory, if anything, because he was fairly certain there was no out for this conversation.

 “Your… situation,” she says.

 “Yes.” He replies immediately, rolls off his tongue like she was some army officer and he was a soldier. It’s a weird thought, really, that despite the fact that she was only 5 foot 3 she would take to command like a duck to water.  Maybe that was in some way discriminatory, or misogynist- he thinks briefly of his lecture in feminist theory and decides it probably was, by virtue of his surprise, sexist. He’d have to work on that.

 He blinks when Natasha’s eyes roll to the ceiling, carefully looking for the right words. “The whole… soulmate thing. How’s that… How’re you feeling about it?”

 Bucky blinks, then squints at her. “Have you talked to Steve about this?”

 Nat doesn’t look in any way shocked by the question, but she does raise her eyebrows. “What, because I asked how you were _feeling_? I’m not a robot, Barnes, I do have feelings-”

 “No no, that’s not what I meant. It’s just- a different approach.”

 “Mm,” she says, pointedly.

 “ _Look,_ I’m not trying to be a dick, it’s just that- it doesn’t matter how I _feel_ about it, it matters how _Steve_ feels about it, so I just thought it was _unusual_ that you’d… you’d...” He trails off. “What?” He asks.

 “Are you- are you really trying to tell me that you think the way you feel about him isn’t affecting Steve?”

 Bucky bites his lips.

 “Barnes, you are _not_ trying to tell me that-” She starts.

 “I just don’t think it’s very relevant! It’s just not relevant!”

 Natasha sighs, and very carefully puts her mug onto the bedside table. It’s lucky he’s utilitarian, because in Sam’s room there might not have been the space to-

 She leans forward, and looks him dead in the eye. “Do you have any _idea_ ,” she says, “How many of your problems would be solved if men were allowed to have slightly better communication skills?”

 Bucky blinks. “That’s a bit-”

 “No, shut up, I’m not done.” Bucky shuts up. “You and Steve are _friends._ He’s worried for you. You’re stand-offish and aggressive, you don’t meet up outside of your visits to- to Tony, and that’s _weird_ for you two.”

Bucky blinks.

“Apparently, you find it easy to talk to him the whole way into the place, and then it’s not even that you shut off at this sight of him! You talk to him, seem for all the world like you _like_ him, and then you switch off. Something is going on here, Barnes-”

Bucky opens his mouth to speak but she holds up a hand.  “And,” she says, “I’m not asking that you tell me about it. I’m asking that for the love of whatever god it is you believe in, you _tell_ your platonic life partner what’s going _on._ ”

And Bucky, he-

It’s-

God, he can feel a twinge in his eye sockets. Before he knows it, it’s welling behind his eyes, and he says- 

“I can’t-”

And then he’s crying, and Natasha looks stricken.

“Oh, _fuck,_ you need me to-” She puts a hand on his knee. “It’s that bad?”

Bucky wipes his eyes. Fucking-

 This was-

 Thank god they lived in a shitty apartment because there was no window and no natural light to show off his presumably pink face. He blinks.

He wipes his eyes again.

“This is stupid. I’ve just not been sleeping very well, recently.”

“Yeah,” Nat mumbles, hand still on his knee. She squeezes, and he puts his metal hand onto hers, even though he can’t feel it. For some reason, he feels like if he’d used his flesh hand, that would have been too much. He might’ve sobbed, and he knows that for whatever reason, that might not have been the best option sat before Natasha. “How come?” she says, softly.

“Just- I’m dreaming, a lot.” He whispers, because if he speaks any louder it’ll come out as hiccups. His cheeks feel hot and his nose even hotter, so he touches the cool metal of his other hand to his face.

“Ah,” Nat returns. “Yeah.”

And thank fuck it was Nat and not Sam, because right about now Sam would be launching into some therapy spiel and that would have been a _nightmare,_ because the last thing Bucky wanted right now was to deal with-

This.

“Hey,” she says. “You want-?” She holds out her drink to him, and he nods.

“Thanks,” he says, and blinks when he touches it to his lips. “Oh,” he mumbles. It’s actually tea. Herbal.

“What?” she asks, one eyebrow raised, just a little.

“I thought it was-” he says, then thinks better of it. “Nevermind.”

He breathes in, and out, and they don’t talk about it anymore.

 

***

 

The conversation with Nat leads him to one conclusion: if his main problem was that nobody seemed to be able to communicate with each other, then that was at least partly his own fault. After all, lying through his teeth whenever he saw Tony and Steve together was not… good. Not good at all. 

So he taps out patterns on his keyboard, and heads to Twitter. If he was meant to hate Tony, then he damn well would _learn_ to hate him.

(If his brain recognises that as a thought he should be curbing, not entertaining, then it’s not in the forefront of his mind. If he does recognise it, he shoves it to the back of his head and takes a breath.)

He searches first just for Tony, and is pretty unsurprised when he can’t see a face even remotely resembling his in the thousands of results. He searches for Tony and Engineer, and is disappointed again. The third time, he searches for Iron Man, and clicks on the one with the most followers, and he is-

Ah.

Most recently, it’s a pinned tweet that simply reads “Like My Insta”, but before that?

Fucking incomprehensible, but he signs every tweet with “xoxo” and-

Bucky’s a sucker. He’s a fucking idiot, because he clicks the link to Tony’s instagram and there it is.

There it is.

Bucky scrolls through instagram with avid eyes and bated breath. He stares at the screen intently.

The first photo is artsy, double exposed. Something Steve would like, probably. It’s of-

Oh. It’s a pool, a person on a floating pool mattress thing. There’s a cocktail in their hands, so perfect-looking it might as well be a stock photo, and their legs are crossed. If he squints, he can see leg hair. Probably Tony, then. The top half of the photo, where the pool ends, is dreamy and smoothed out. It’s an imprint of light filtering through trees in a forest.

“Wish you were here,” the caption reads. “XOXO.”

Bucky covers his face with his hands and bites back a breath.

The next photo is a woman in a suit. She looks radiant in a white suit, ginger hair pulled back. She wears a smile that looks equal parts adoring and despairing, and he feels his stomach drop through the floor for just a second. If he _wasn’t_ … if Tony was straight, what did that mean?

What the fuck would that _mean?_

He makes an account. Not then and there, not immediately. But he does it. He thinks about it for days, thinks about the beautiful women on Tony’s instagram. He thinks about his blunt fingernails, and Nat’s blunt fingernails, and makes connections where there were none and jumps where there’s nothing to jump.

So he makes an account. It’s not under his real name, of course, it’s barely even an account at all. But he checks it.

(He feels it twist in his gut that he’s not telling Steve. At this point, he’s crossed some line, crossed some unseen barrier. But he still doesn’t tell Steve.)

He sees Tony in the clearing that week, and he’s _looking_ for it. As if you could tell just by looking. And he’s-

“Nervous?” Tony asks, as normal.

Bucky’s face twitches. “Sure,” he says, and that’s the end of their interaction for the week.

But he watches Steve and Tony, watches the fluidity of Tony, his motion, the way he moves as if he has less than a care in the world sometimes, and then twitches like a rat in a trap the next.  He watches the way Steve moves too, purposeful, clear. Steve has clarity, here, where Tony switches between overt and covert, quiet and loud in his movements. It’s odd, because Bucky’s never had to- he’s never had to look for clues to a person’s sexuality before.

(He used to go out on one night stands, before. When he was younger, he’d kiss women, up and down and left and right, he’d lean into their lips, gentle and forceful and keen all at once. He’d praise women like they were gods, which they often were. He’d never-

He’d never had to-

He was quite clearly barking up the wrong tree. If there was ever a person able to tell someone’s sexuality by looking at them, Bucky was most certainly not that person.)

Still, he watches. He thinks of the module he’d done on Feminist Theory. He’d been the only dude in the class, and he’d heard the word Scopophilia, and couldn’t help but think he was so, so guilty of it. The love of looking, the professor had explained it as. Bucky listens to music in the corner of the clearing, and stares intently at the way they interact, and he-

He breathes deeply.

 

***

He has to work up the courage. He feels it roll around like a steel ball in his chest,  tapping and clacking occasionally against his ribcage, forcibly making him aware of his own very frail position in this mess. He’d fucked up, probably, judging by the way that he and Steve _barely_ talk anymore, except for those hikes to the clearing, he just… He didn’t know what he could’ve done _better._

And he cannot- he can’t stop thinking about it. Was Tony straight? If he was-

Was he involved with that woman on Instagram? Pepper, according to the many captions attributed to her. She was beautiful. So was-

He blinks and forces his brain to change track.

It’s late. It’s very late, the same day as they’d visited the clearing. It’s pitch black outside his room, not that he would know. The lack of window-light bites into his eyes, he feels like the dark is leeching off him.

He can’t fall asleep. He’ll dream again.

He thinks about it and thinks about it. He feels far out to sea, adrift, alone, trapped and overspread at once. It follows him, tails his thoughts. Like crows after corpses or rats after trash, he thinks briefly about rodents and electricity cables, about gnawing through plastic insulation to hit livewire.

It’s late. He can’t sleep.

He makes his twitter public. And then he just-

He thinks about communication skills. He’s sleep deprived and his whole body aches for something, and he- Well. He’s going to dream tonight whatever happens, but if he-

If he just-

So he types out a tweet, trembling finger after trembling finger hitting keys. It’s a simple message, but he-

“Are you and Pepper together?”

He deletes that.

“Are you and Pepper together? Are you straight?”

It’s worse than the first message, but- he’s tired. He’s tired and he’s been kept awake and all he needs right now is some closure and something to calm his fucking frantic brain, so… He taps send.

Then he falls, quickly and all at once, an avalanche, into sleep.

 

***

 

He’s in his room again. In his dreams, his room has a window, a drip dropping of light into his world that he doesn’t have in real life. It filters through, softens the image in front of him.

There’s Tony. He’s in bed with-

Someone. Could be anyone, really, they’re writhing in bed together, Tony kissing up the column of their neck. The person in the bed has no distinguishing features, other than their pale hair and sharp nose. Could be anyone.

His whole being relaxes.

He wasn’t committing a sin this time, he was just-

Tony kisses up their jawline, and Bucky realises that that’s _Steve._ And even if it wasn’t Steve, it is now, his jawline stronger and his chest flatter in places, body bulked out. Tony is no longer the one on top, instead it’s Steve kissing down his chest, body softer than it looks in person, whole being relaxed but grabbing at Steve with his fingers and thighs.

Bucky stands back, voyeur, _scopophiliac,_ shouts his brain, and suddenly Steve looks up, and shouts, “ _What the fuck!_ ”

And then they’re both standing up in front of him.

“How _dare you-_ ” says one.

“I _hate you-”_ says the other.

“I thought you hated me!”

“ _I’ll never love you_ -” they both say, and he wakes up.

And here’s the thing. He wakes up crying, somehow, but when he checks Twitter, and sees Tony’s response?

His breath catches in his throat.

When he falls back to sleep, he doesn’t dream.

His brain cites it in the morning, clings to it like a child to a safety blanket. It sits on his chest and _purrs._

[[Unknown, Tony (Iron Man).

“Straight? Have you got the right guy? Speaking of straight, Pepper’s looking for a girlfriend. If anyone knows of a lady who trims her nails and does martial arts, I’ve got the girl for you. The application process is rigorous and I Will Haze You.” August 8th, 20XX. Tweet.]]

For the next week, Bucky doesn’t dream at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this is a speedy update after the last one, but I'd love to hear your thoughts! As always, I'm looking for anyone willing to be a beta, and comments are the only reason this chapter was written so fast.
> 
> Muchos love, and if you want to see in progress snippets follow me @verulamfic on [ tumblr](http://verulamfic.tumblr.com) or my new [twitter! ](https://twitter.com/verulamfic)


	5. Four: Clumsy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky comes to yet more realisations: It's been kind of the season for it. Things start to fit into place.
> 
> He just can't stop _dreaming_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unebeta!d, but I'm always looking for folx willing to have a look over my work! :)

Bucky feels a lot like, at some point, he should be abandoning the “I hate Tony” act in the dust. Along with his dignity, probably, but that already appeared to be fucked. Regardless, when he goes to the clearing with Steve for the first time since learning Tony wasn’t straight, he feels the nerves on his tongue.

He’d not been able to think about anything since, barely been able to think about his essays, some of which had been worth over 50% of his module mark.

They trudge through the forest. It’s still sunny, still bright, and like always the sunshine filters through the canopy in a way that makes it look dreamlike. It looks filtered, changed somehow, by something divine or godly.

He blinks, and he and Steve are talking about Nat, again.

“She said she came and talked to you?”

“Mm,” Bucky returns, nonchalant. “Yeah, she did.”

“She…” Steve stutters for just a moment, holding back a branch for Bucky in a way that is almost ingrained into them, now. Bucky goes through, thanks him, then holds it up, fingers twisting in the foliage. The ground was still wet from last night's rain, except for those few spots where unfettered sunlight hit the ground. “She said that… you were feeling a bit rough,” he tries. “You wanna… talk about it?”

Bucky purses his lips, just a little. “She told you that?”

“Yeah,” mumbles Steve, then gesticulates with his hands, just a little. Bucky is watching for body language, now, watching for the way he and Tony moved. “Not- I guessed a lot. Inferred stuff. You… seem like you could use a break?”

And it’s phrased that way, like a question. Bucky wonders briefly when these conversations started to hinge on Bucky’s deteriorating mental state.

“Yeah,” he mumbles. “But I’ve been sleeping better, recently.”

“Mm,” returns Steve, equally as mumbled. At the quietness of Steve’s voice, Bucky is suddenly very aware of the birds in the trees and the way the whole forest crunches beneath their feet. “You-”

It’s coiled in his gut again. Come clean, Barnes-

“No, I just…” He says instead. “I’m tired.”

Steve squints at him. “We all are, Buck. I’m worried about you.”

His breath comes like a sharp spear, hitting the sunlight somehow. “Yes,” he mumbles. “I’m worried about me, too.”

And he means it.

The truthfulness of that statement suddenly hits him like a freight train. He sighs again, and when his mouth opens, he feels himself convulse, almost, once again with snakes for organs and body twitching with tension.

He walks faster, almost without thinking about it, and he grumbles under his breath about nonsense things with nonsense words, and when he finally stops to glance around Steve is right behind him and-

He goes to run his hand through his hair but realises pretty quick that he’d tied it up in a fucking bun. Idiot.

He spits out a curse and turns bodily around to Steve with half his hair hanging out of the tie.

“Huh,” says Steve, softly, quietly. He says it with a smile on his face, a kind one, and Bucky feels like if he was any other person that might aggravate him, but it’s Steve and Steve-

God for-fucking-bid, Steve wasn’t out to get him.

Nobody was.

He feels pricks in his eyes again, so he shuts them and stands stock still.

“Buck,” Steve says softly, “I’m gonna… fix your hair, now.”

And he does, fingers gentle and significant in their movement like he knew exactly what he was doing. Bucky keeps his eyes squeezed tight shut, but he can- he can feel Steve’s warm body on his, can feel his breath on his, can feel the sunlight on the both of them. “There,” mumbles Steve. “That’s-”

There’s a pause.

“That’s not better at all,” Steve decides, and Bucky coughs out a laugh. And then, with a smile in his voice, “You look fucking ridiculous, Barnes.”

Bucky opens his eyes, and if Steve notices the residual tears dripping down his face, he doesn’t mention it. Instead, he says: “Get yourself a stylist, Bucky. Ask Nat to-”

“What?!” Bucky laughs. “Nat as a stylist? Just because she’s a woman-?”

“No,” snorts Steve. “She’s stylish,” he insists.

“She only ever wears black!”

Steve shoves his shoulder, laughing. “You only ever wear black, James Buchanan Barnes, you’ve got a serious case of the pot-kettle-black syndrome-”

“Rude. What are you insinuating about my fashion sense, anyway?”

“It’s very…” he looks down at Bucky’s denim jacket and his jeans, all the way down to his boots. “Utilitarian,” Steve tries.

“Coming from you, Rogers, Mister ‘white shirt and jeans’! At least I know how to style my hair-”

“I don’t have enough of it to style-!”

“That’s just an excuse, you know that I always wanted to be the prettiest boy at the ball-”

And there’s a moment, a brief one, where Bucky feels his heart swell. His whole being elates with it, muscles loosening and face cooling into a broad smile.

Steve falters, for just a moment, and then smiles.

“Oh,” he says. “I’ve missed you,” and then his arms are around Bucky’s shoulders and they’re hugging it out, bros bein’ bros, just two dudes hugging in the middle of a forest-

And Bucky nestles his chin into Steve’s shoulder, clasps him back. Steve doesn’t flinch at the cold metal of his arm, doesn’t even blink, it’s just Steve and Bucky and their breath so close that Bucky could almost swear they breathe the same air, use the same lungs.

They don’t, of course, and Bucky-

He’s suddenly very, very struck, by the want to breathe that same air. He wants to put-

God, he wants to kiss his best friend.

He doesn’t even have time to process that, because Steve is pushing away, onto his tiptoes, and pressing a chaste kiss onto Bucky’s forehead.

“Oh,” Bucky murmurs.

“Please,” whispers Steve. “Look after yourself. I don’t think… I don’t think I could stand to l-”

-And Bucky’s brain fills in, ‘love’, ‘lose’, ‘lead you on’, ‘let you down’, but what Steve says instead-

“-let you go,” he says, quietly, so quietly, into Bucky’s temple. “God,” he mumbles. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you, Bucky but-”

And then his guts fall out of his stomach because he’s thinking again about the whole charade, about Tony, about Steve’s soulmate and the way they fit together like pieces of a puzzle just waiting to be finished. He’s thinking about, God, how this cannot go on any longer and-

Bucky smiles a tight smile, and Steve looks earnestly into his eyes, hands clasped around his shoulders. “I’m serious, Bucky,” he says. “Look after yourself.” He gives Bucky’s shoulders a shake. “Please.”

“I’m, uh.” He lets Steve’s hold relax and then starts walking. “I’m trying,” he gets out, strained. “I’m really trying.”

And it’s absolutely right. He’s just trying a long way around.

The long way around apparently including falling for both his best friend’s soulmate and, as it turns out, his best friend.

“Wh-” He says, out loud, because what. What did that-

He didn’t-

He couldn’t-

He and Steve? He and his best friend?

Bucky blinks and all his dreams, Steve and Tony and then them both and them none at all, come hurtling back to him.

Oh god, this was worse than with-

“Y’okay, Buck?”

“Yeah,” he croaks. “Headache,” he mumbles.

Then Steve’s hand is on his hand and it is torture, because-

What the fuck was he meant to do. Lie? Stop being friends with Steve, stop this whole ‘Tony’ business?

Just when-

He bites back a sob.

Just when he’d figured out that Tony and Steve would work. Just when he’d figured out that it could happen, that he could stamp down on those emotions until they died they just…

They just kept coming back.

God, he was turning into an angsty teenager. What the fuck.

He steels his jaw, draws himself to his full height, and takes a body-breath, from his stomach up to his mouth, and says, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

And they walk the rest of the way in comparative silence.

***

“Nervous?” Tony asks, glancing up at him. He’s-

He’s not, actually. Not really. He feels like he’s stepped back, checked out. There was only so much he could do.

So he meets Tony’s eyes and smiles and says, “Not today,” and then feels his body relax, just a little when Tony smiles back.

He’s as fluid as he’s ever been, stretching in the cold blue light of his garage. He looks alien: body tinged and filtered through the coolness of the light. It was odd, Tony seemed the type to flourish in sunlight, not that Bucky had any basis for that. He just… came across that way, something about his brown eyes and the way they hit the light. The blue reflections in them make him seem otherworldly.

He finds himself looking at Steve, too, watching him. Steve, as he always does with Tony, is moving with something like precision. He seems like he’s come to an epiphany, somehow, like he knows exactly what he’s doing.

The snakes that have been living in Bucky’s stomach for weeks now start to quiet, just a little.

***

“Bucky!” Steve calls, and when Bucky blinks back into concentration, he’s waving a hand in front of his face. “Hello,” he smiles.

“Hi,” returns Bucky. He realises all at once that he’s in infinitely better spirits since his… realisation. Being in lust with both his best friend’s soulmate and his best friend wasn’t too bad. It was only lust, after all, and since realising that his overactive sex-drive was applied equally to Tony and Steve, he’s reasonably sure it’s just lust, nothing more.

Love was fake, anyway, just chemicals and signals lost in neural pathways.

He feels physically lighter, steps springing and body engaged and straight in a way it hasn’t been in weeks.

“You ready to go?” Steve asks.

“Uh,” mumbles Bucky, putting down his book. He’d been reading the Odyssey, but there was only so much Epic Poetry he could take before he started to live and breathe it. “Sure,” he says, “Lemme just- gotta get changed, first.”

Steve nods and leaves quickly. His footsteps on the floorboards creak, but it's not a noise that disquiets him as much as it should. Steve was bulky, and in all honesty, the ache of the floorboards was more like usual than he’d had in over a month now. Steve was the only one in the apartment heavy enough to make them creak that way.

He blinks when his brain is suddenly full of creaking bed springs and the steady groan of a man that was far too big to be moaning that way-

He shakes his head, shoves the thought out of his mind, biting back a laugh. He was incorrigible. Fucking remarkable, the amount of sex his brain seemed to be wanting him to have. It was hardly his fault that it was everyone else’s deadline season, still. There was no clubbing to be had this time of year, and certainly, no one night stands.

He pads over the wardrobe. He squints- in the yellow light of his bedside lamp it was tough to tell what would look good on him, really. He settles on what could be a black button-up, but could also easily be navy. Either way, he pulls it on as quickly as he can, before switching out his sweats to jeans and toeing on some actual outdoorsy shoes.

He’d never used to own comfortable shoes: he went barefoot at home, and also frequently elsewhere. Steve found feet kind of gross, but frankly that wasn’t going to stop him from taking his shoes off the moment he sat down in a cafe or a study space. He needed freedom for his feet, dammit, and he wasn’t about to deny himself that just because Steve was some sort of foot-fascist.

When he steps out of the room, Steve raises an eyebrow at him. “Nice shirt,” he says, face tinged slightly pink-

Bucky glances down at himself and realises he could not possibly have done a worse job at buttoning it. His midriff is mostly on display.

“Fashion,” he replies, immediately, then raises an eyebrow when Steve snorts. “This is what everyone was wearing at the Met Gala this year-”

“Sure, it was.” Steve retorts. “But you’re not at an haute couture gathering right now, are you-?”

“I could be. Tony might like it, for all you know, he could be fashion conscious-”

Steve chokes out a laugh. “Tony? Buck, I know you don’t pay much attention, but have you ever seen him wear anything other than a tank top-?”

“You don’t know, though! He could! You might just not be paying much attention-” Bucky laughs, loud and bright and body-built. Steve smiles back at him, teeth on show, and Bucky obediently starts fixing his buttons.

“I think I’m probably paying more attention than you are,” Steve says, arms crossed and shoulders back. He’s smiling. Still, eyes crinkled at the sides when Bucky glances up.

“Hey,” mumbles Bucky. “You don’t know my life-”

“I do wonder though, what he wears to formals and stuff. He’s gotta own something other than tank tops and jeans, right?”

“Sure,” replies Bucky, heaving a breath. It was weird that he was allowing this, really. But the conversation slips around him like he’s trying to catch fish with his bare hands, and soon he’s pretty invested in the kind of clothes Tony might wear. It’s almost an hour later after they’ve left the house and were nearing the clearing, that he says:“Okay, hear me out-”

“What,” laughs Steve, “You’re about to say something super bad, aren’t you?”

Bucky snorts. “Really, hear me out- do you think he’s the kind of guy who’s worn, like, a bunny suit? Like a playboy style-”

“Watch your mouth, Barnes,” says Steve, swatting at him. He’s still smiling though, so Bucky counts that as a win. “That’s Tony you’re talking about.”

And it is. Bucky can’t shake the image of this muscular engineer with bunny ears and a bodysuit, it is an image that clings to the edges of his brain even as they finally start nearing the clearing.

“I’m just saying, you can’t assume what the guy is likely to wear on Halloween unless you’ve-”

“Mad Scientist,” Steve returns, immediately. “He’s definitely the type to dress up in a lab coat-”

“With lingerie underneath-”

“James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve laughs. “I hope you know I’m only tolerating this because-”

“Because you can also imagine him with lingerie underneath a lab coat-”

Steve swats at him, snorting and opening his mouth to reply, but they’re so close to the clearing that Bucky thinks maybe it’s time to finish this conversation before-

“See,” calls Tony, over the trill of birds. “I know you stopped talking because you didn’t want me to hear, but may I just say that I have worn a bunny costume before, and it was-”

They step into the gap in the trees, and Bucky feels his face flush. Steve, when Bucky looks over at him instead of Tony in panic, is very clearly enjoying himself.

“What, why are you- you’re embarrassed? Babe,” Tony speeds through his words, “Bucky, babe, this is not a loud forest on your end. It’s quiet, in fact, so quiet that I am well aware of the fact that this is all you’ve been thinking about for at least 50 feet! If you’re surprised I could hear you then you should probably take a second to think about me, engineer to the stars, and what I can do with a bit of sound equipment and noise-cancelling stuff, and let’s be real-” He stops, suddenly, to take a breath. “Also, you are looking dashing today, Barnes. Tall, dark, all black? Take me to the ball, boy-”

Bucky is suddenly feeling very trapped by the whole situation.

“Or actually, wait, don’t, because I told Pep and Rhodey we could do a quadruple date with Zeke, and I’m going to make Pep wear that white suit again and-”

Steve is staring at Tony like he’s some kind of trickster god, wordy and mouthy like he can barely hold back his tongue.

“Tony,” Steve says, cutting across him. “Are you okay?”

Tony blinks down at him. “Sure,” he says, slowly. “It concerns me that you’re asking that. Doesn’t happen very often and whatever, but the look you’re giving me right now is-”

“You’re speaking faster than usual,” Bucky interjects.

“Oh. Oh!” Tony says, eyes widening. “Yeah, Redbull will do that to you. Remarkable that I’m still coherent, frankly.”

When Tony sways slightly in the blue light, Bucky squints. “Tony,” he tries, then blinks when Tony’s stare lays heavy on his.

“You know, mountain man, I’ve been worried about you. Are you doing better? It’s been a month or so since you were…” He gestures with his fingers, splaying them wide. “Like this.”

“I’m fine,” Bucky says. “Are… you?”

Tony frowns, arms crossing. He continues to sway, just a little. “Alright, Concern-Police, I’m fine.”

Bucky and Steve share the quickest look they can manage and something important passes between them. When they look back, though, Tony seems angry.

“You know I can see when you do that, right?” Then he blinks and heaves a breath. “God, that’s something my Dad used to say.”

“Tony…” Steve starts, walking towards the portal slowly, palms facing outward. “We don’t want to press you-”

“And you don’t have to,” Tony sighs. “Sorry. I had a lot to drink last night. I’m just a bit-” A twig snaps under Steve’s weight, and Tony’s eyes snap up, eyes wild and hair more unkempt than Bucky’s ever seen it. “Twitchy,” Tony finishes, falteringly. “Okay,” he mumbles, heaving another breath. “I’m just-”

Steve comes to a halt, fingers nearly brushing the portal. They don’t touch the heavy blackness that was the edges of it though, and Bucky steps forward until he’s situated just-so behind Steve with their shoulders planted heavy next to each other.

“You may have noticed,” Tony says, slowly, as if he’s tasting the words on his tongue. “I am not the best at moderation.”

Steve sighs, softly, eyebrows creasing up in the middle. “If it helps, Tony, I genuinely hadn’t.”

Tony seems to visibly bite something back, then, like there’s some gut reaction ready to spew forward. His fists clench, and then unclench, deliberately.

“You don’t know me very well yet, then.”

It’s then that Bucky has the very real realisation that Steve’s soulmate was just a man and not some trial from god made to tempt him. Bucky feels Steve’s shoulder clench a little bit closer to his body.

He’s stepped on a fucking landmine, somehow, and Bucky was along for the ride.

There’s very suddenly a flush of realisation on Tony’s face, and his hunched shoulders smooth out into a relaxed posture. He looks, once again, like usual, as if the conversation hadn’t happened and as if he hadn’t just been swaying around like a fucking drunk.

“Sorry about that,” he says, cracking his neck. “That was a bit real, wasn’t it? Anyway, what have you two been up to-”

When Bucky and Steve share another look, he sighs, but his shoulders don’t hunch back up. “Tony-” Bucky tries, but Tony cuts across him.

“We’ll talk about this at some point,” he says, and he sounds like he’s being crushed under some great weight. “But not… not today,” he says, and then clenches and unclenches his jaw. When neither Steve nor Bucky say anything in response, he looks down, then back up. “Please, not today.”

So they don’t talk about it.

***

The next time they visit, it’s as usual as it was the first two times they’d met. Bucky is engaged, Tony is involved, Steve is the rock that binds them together, and it’s okay. It’s okay, Bucky realises in a little epiphany. It’s not strained, it’s not forced, Tony is relaxed and very, very human.

It’s nice.

Eventually, it relaxes out into nothing and soft tones, and Tony sits on the top of his workbench with a tablet, and taps at it like his life depends on it. Steve is sitting across from him, facing him, fingers smoothing across his black sketchbook and chalk making clicks and clacks against the paper.

Bucky sits across from them, too, further back but able to see them both if he just looks up from his book.

The ground is soft, and the company is gentle, and his brain slows to a fraction of the pace of ordinary.

He takes a breath through his nose and then lets it out through his mouth. The air smells like dirt and petrichor, but it hadn’t rained recently as far as he knew.

“Smells like thunderstorms,” mumbles Bucky, under his breath, stretching out his back against the tree he’s leaned up against.

“In a good way?” Tony asks, mouth barely moving and not looking up from where he’s staring at his tablet.

“Mm,” he says, softly. “Yeah.”

When they leave, Steve quietly purrs something at Tony.

Bucky can’t make it out, but the way they are so very close, with foreheads touching and bodies just-so, makes his heart twinge with something that reminds him faintly as envy.

Then he remembers that no matter how close they looked, there was a universe barrier preventing them from- well. Preventing them.

His heart twinges again, but this time it feels nothing like envy.

***

“I love you,” someone huffs out, into the dark warmth that was is room. It could’ve been any of them, voices thick and heavy, met with a rumble of agreement that strikes Bucky as something beyond, something godly, something worth all of this.

“I love you too,” Bucky says, to either of them.

Then they slur over to him in moves that look like waves breaking, and then their mouths are on him, working their way up and down him like he were a popsicle. It’s lapping like waves, again, but this time it’s on him, their combined movement like the great tides themselves. He’s lost, somehow, but the water is warm, and if he drowned he’s not sure he’d mind.

“Bucky,” croons one of them.

“Bucky,” croons the other one.

“You good?” soothes one, “You okay?”

And he is.

***

He wakes up with a hard-on and guilt-ridden bones where he hadn’t had them before.

The dream chases him like a dog, and Bucky thinks of rat traps and thin tails.

The more he tries to remember what it was he’d said to make himself feel so bad, though, the more he forgets.

He’s as guilty as he’s ever been. And god for-fucking-bid, he can’t remember why.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I love a good comment, and I definitely love talkin about this verse to people, so if you fancy a chat, lemme know!
> 
> You can find me on Twitter @verulamfic and on Tumblr as @verulamfic and @verulams!


	6. Five: Toxic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky comes to _the_ realisation.   
>  They go to the clearing, and understand a little more. Things come to a head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this one! It's been a busy few weeks. :)

It’s high summer, pretty quick. The light filters through the trees, as it always does.

 Bucky and Tony shoot quips at each other, sometimes. Mostly, Bucky stands at the back and maintains that whoever’s problem his feelings were, they sure as fuck weren’t his. Dreaming about something didn’t make it _real._

 

***

 Bucky, in the rare moments that he’s real with himself, knows that these realisations weren’t like they always seemed in the movies.

 He understands that the way he’s feeling is not necessarily automatically the baddie of a soap opera love triangle, and he realises that there’s very little he can do about… this. Whatever this was.

 But he also recognises that it couldn’t be allowed. Tony was Steve’s soulmate, and soulmates were a two-way deal. There was no three-way, threesome style menage-a-trois that he could sneak in between the lines. If, god forbid, that _did_ happen (which it wouldn’t), then he feels almost like it would _whet_ his appetite, not sate it.

 His dreams were evidence enough of that.

 But nonetheless Bucky is somehow losing a battle where he was the only combatant. It was just him, nobody out to get him, nobody waiting for him to fall.

 Just him.

 

***

 

They walk to the clearing together, and Steve’s in high spirits. It’s infectious, somehow, like his good mood and the spring in his step is the same as the scorching sun above them. They both smell like sunblock, and it smells like the high tide of the season in a way that makes his bones ache.

Bucky was never usually a guy for summer. He liked sports, sure, enjoyed working outside so he could feel pleasantly ache-y the next day, but… something about it didn’t mesh well with his brain. Sometimes in summer he felt overexposed like a shitty polaroid, like something left on the window too long to bleach to white in sunlight.

Today doesn’t feel like that. Today feels warm and pleasantly so, gentle to the touch and soft against his skin. The sunblock probably helped with that, honestly speaking. Bucky wasn’t one to burn that easily, but Steve was a stickler for it these days. Steve in the sun seemed to catch alight, kindling on a fire, and he turned pretty quick from pale to pink within a few minutes of being caught out in the sun.

And when Steve had asked, “Can you put some on my back, please, Buck?” He’d said yes.

And he’d held his breath as Steve, best friend since forever, stripped out of his shirt and flexed just to stretch, just to feel his muscles move beneath him, and Bucky’s tongue had felt bigger in his mouth. He’d braced his prosthetic against Steve’s skin, and he’d started, and Bucky had bitten back a laugh at the way Steve so obviously frowned,  and then he’d just… done it. Skin to skin, Bucky’s blunt fingers against Steve’s infinitely paler skin.

And Bucky had wanted to kiss him.

Bucky had wanted to kiss him _so badly._ Planes of skin pulled taut over the top of sinews and musculature, Steve was not a small guy, anymore, and-

Look, he’s no saint, and Steve had moved and Bucky had lost the braced grip he’d had with his prosthetic on slippery skin, and then-

Then it was Bucky’s body on Steve’s body, and Steve was bracing backwards, and god forbid because Bucky was acting like a goddamned thunderstruck _teen._ His breath comes short and he feels his skin against the tensed muscles of Steve and god fucking _damnit,_ Bucky wanted to _kiss him_.

He doesn’t, of course, and Steve asks if he’s okay, and he says yes. And he moves on.

They both do, except of course Steve hasn’t noticed anything to move on from.

So by the time they’re walking to the clearing, Steve is slicked to high heaven and Bucky is just… absorbing the sun into his skin. It’s nice, as it so often is. It feels weird, on principle, that he’s so comfortable on these hikes. The nerves set into him only after they’ve arrived, usually, and this time is no different.

The hike feels calm, collected. It feels soft against him.

It feels, really, like he should feel all the time around Steve, and that thought clangs against his calm. If his feelings towards Steve weren’t the problem, then clearly there was something about _Tony_ that made everything worse.

They arrive and he’s struck again. Of course, it’s not Tony that makes everything worse. He’s like a bespoke machine, built for the specifics of that basement laboratory and completely in his element. His mouth chatters out pleasantries and smoothes out compliments like he was made for it. His mouth is-

His brain says ‘soft’, so he stamps down again and retracts. When Steve and Tony sit, with backs to the portal, Bucky rustles around his bag for his copy of the Odyssey and then, instead of reading, watches them.

It’s soft.  It’s good, feels organic on his tongue in the same way fresh fruit did. And they stay that way for a while, sun filtering down through the trees. Soft, softer, softest, until Steve is almost falling asleep.

Tony shows no sign of tiring though, fingers flying on this pad of his and body taut and purposive, so Bucky reaches over and shakes Steve, just a little, until-

Until he opens his eyes, sleepy and saccharine and oh, _god,_ Bucky is having fucking heart palpitations and his whole body is something _different,_ frenetic, twitching.

 Steve’s eyes widen. “Y’alright?” He suddenly says, and Bucky realises some of it must have been writ on his face.

So he steps back and as he does, Tony blinks into the present, shifting from work-mode into the light, and his tablet smashes to the ground. They all start.

“See,” mumbles Tony. “That’s gorilla glass. There’s… not a large possibility that it’s smashed.”

“Lemme get it,” mumbles Bucky, without thinking, without blinking, “That way it’s not your fault if it is-”

“ _Bucky-”_

Steve’s hand lands on his shoulder and he connects with the portal for the both of them and-

They both feel it. They _must_ do, and Tony must do as well, because his eyes go big and round.

“Woah,” he says, before Bucky even has the chance to recognise what he’s feeling. “That’s… unexpected.”

And it is, because the portal feels…. warm. It feels like the kind of sun that hits the back of necks in the spring, after a long, cold winter. It feels like holding hands in the middle of a bustling city, hearing a busker play your favourite song, just by chance, or like the way that newly washed sheets felt on the skin after all the effort of cleaning them.

Bucky blinks, and remembers that this moment is not for him.

He grabs his hand back, fully intent on letting Steve and Tony enjoy- whatever this soulmate portal was making them feel, but Steve whirls around with a bright flash of concern in his eyes and he sounds frantic as he calls Bucky’s name.

“Are you okay? Did you- did you feel that too?”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, in a low voice. “I felt it.”

And he did, that much is undeniable. But it wasn’t his moment to _have_ , not his to feel or his to savour.

Steve, once again, appears completely unaware of what it meant that Bucky had just intruded on a moment that seems… sacred.

“Woah,” mumbles Tony, and suddenly Bucky zeroes in on the way his muscles are all relaxed and gentle, almost against his will, and god _damn_ it Bucky, pull yourself together- “Hm, maybe-“ He fiddles with a dial. “Feedback? Possible… Extraneous variable, something I didn’t notice before, maybe-“ he’s mumbling to himself, and Bucky quickly notices that he’s been staring at Tony, and he picks up almost immediately after that that Steve has _noticed._

Tony is suddenly doing something very complicated with his hands and throwing the dimensions of the blue light all around the room. He passes over some numbers, focusses on some, moving his arms fast enough that if Bucky doesn’t concentrate, they’re a blur. He skips symbols that Bucky doesn’t understand, focusses on some things that don’t even look like _English._ Then, eventually, he brings up something that looks like a question mark. He makes it bigger and bigger, then throws his arms out until the light focusses down.

It… it sure is a question mark.

“Thanks, Buck, that’s really illuminating,” says Steve.

“You’re welcome,” Bucky returns and Tony looks briefly amused before shushing them.

“This is… weird. See, I’ve been tracking this, this..” he gestures towards them. “This anomaly, and it’s… hm.”

He looks back at them both and then puts a finger over his lips. “According to my frankly fantastic and completely infallible supercomputer, which, by the way, I built with my own hands, that… didn’t happen.”

There’s a silence, then, when Steve and Bucky look at each other. Something seems to pass between them, some understanding, but fuck knew if Bucky knew what understanding that was.

“Huh,” says Tony, again. “So that was-“ he glances from Steve to Bucky to the huge question mark hovering just in front of his face. “You felt that too, right?”

“Yeah,” says Steve, still a little breathless. “We- I did, I did.”

“Like,”  says Tony. “What did- what did you feel?”

“Warmth,” says Steve, at the same time as Bucky says “Sunlight,” and at the same time as Tony says, “Energy.”

Tony’s brow furrows, and he leans forward. “Yeah, see, you’d be- that’s a phenomenon, huh? That sure is… a phenomenon experienced by three separate people, at the same time, within a split second, and _not…_ ” he spreads his fingers and zooms in and out on the question mark. “Not showing up. That didn’t… that didn’t happen. That’s…”

He looks from Steve to Bucky to the question mark to back again.

“Huh,” he says again. “Huh.”

And then Bucky realises what the silent understanding that they’d had- he realises with a crash of thunder and lightning because he looks over at Steve and suddenly he-

It’s not something Tony would have noticed. It’s not something _Bucky_ would have noticed. But Steve’s set his brow and his jaw, and his shoulders are square in a way that means he’s just come to the same guessed understanding that Bucky has.

Tony hadn’t said ‘portal.’ He hadn’t… he hadn’t said the word ‘soulmate’, in any of the times they’d met.

He’d said ‘anomaly.’

He’d said ‘unusual’.

Steve’s big, warm future with his soulmate, with his lifelong partner, was-

Tony didn’t know Steve was his soulmate.

Okay, okay. Okay. Bucky breathes in and out, gently and slowly. Tony continues to stare at the question mark, hands clasped to his chin and body arched in a way that Bucky would think was artful, in any other moment but this.

“Tony,” says Bucky, when Steve doesn’t say anything, with his set jaw and furrowed brow. “Tony,” he says again, when he doesn’t look over.

“Huh?” He mumbles, glancing over, then peering back towards the numbers as he manipulates and warps then with his fingers.

“Do you… do you believe in soulmates?”

“What?” says Tony, snorting. “No. I’m- sorry, one sec. I’ll just-“

There’s a brief millisecond where Bucky sees Steve physically step back, and then-

He trips some unseen switch.  Tony has just enough time to say “fuck, oh, sorry-!”

And then the portal closes.

 

***

 

They walk back to the car in silence.

They’re quiet enough that the crunching of the twigs beneath their feet echoes out.

And then: “I’m not gonna give up,” Steve mumbles.

“Are you sure-?”

Steve slams his hand against a tree.

“ _Yes, I’m damn sure.”_

It’s like a scene out of a movie. Birds fly out of the trees, and Bucky feels the impact of it as though he’s been struck.

“Steve,” he tries, softly. It’s like calming a wild animal, hands out and fingers splayed even though Steve can’t see them. “Tony doesn’t even know-“

“And he shouldn’t! I’m gonna do this the right way, take it slow-”

“Steve-” he tries again.

“I don’t know what else you want me to _say-”_

_“Breathe, Steve!”_

And thank god, he does. He slowly and gingerly draws his open palm back from the tree.

And Steve says, “oh, god,” in the quietest voice Bucky has ever heard him use.

They hug, and if it were a movie, the sky would open up and rain would pour.

It’s not, though, so the sun shines down through the canopy and bathes them both in light.

 

***

 

They don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about the way Tony had acted as if none of this meant anything, they don’t talk about the way Steve was devastated, they don’t talk about the way Bucky was more and more furious by the very fucking second.

Not even once.

 

***

 

They’re hiking back, again. And god forbid Bucky’s honest with himself, because he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to see him, doesn’t want to admit that maybe there wasn’t a soulmate thing after all and Tony was _r-_

Of course he wasn't right. Bucky blinks to himself as Steve makes nervous conversation. He’s wringing his hands, and every step echoes out through the forest in a way that it shouldn’t. It’s a forest, after all, and Bucky wonders why it always seemed like an open space. It felt like an expanse, a lake, a clearing, and very rarely felt like the claustrophobia that Bucky sometimes felt in his unlit room. It’s agoraphobic instead, like he’s trapped in out to sea, or in space, a billion miles from land or planet. He feels like he can barely feel the floor beneath his feet.

It simmers in his skin. He can feel it itching at his bones, shifting like sand against the marrow of him. It aches. He’s so-

God, Bucky has never considered himself an angry person. Something about this… this _guy_ , something about Tony, made him feel immediately like he was about to shudder apart at the seams at any given moment. Even his newfound lust for Steve hadn’t caused that, he’d just… admitted it to himself, felt uncomfortable, and then stamped down. He’s kind of in the habit of that now.

The walk to the clearing is introspective, for both of them. He takes a glance at Steve and heaves a breath over the gentle rhythm of his lungs. It’s an odd second, because _god,_ Bucky cannot imagine his life without Steve.

When they get to the clearing, Tony is there.

He smiles. “You guys were quiet, today,” he says, stretching up from where he’s sat cross-legged on top of his work bench. He hops down, and his feet must cramp as he lands, because his body immediately doubles over and he roars a shriek. “ _Oh fuck,”_ he yowls, jumping up and down and grabbing at the offending appendage. “Fuck you, body, you have _betrayed_ me-”

Steve sniggers a laugh that is at once both soft and harsh. It rings out and Tony frowns at him. “Don’t laugh at my pain, Rogers, I’m in _agony._ ”

“Mm,” says Steve, chin up and arms crossed, smile all over his face. “Sure, you are.”

Tony relinquishes hold of his foot and stands up straight too, mimicking Steve precisely. “You don’t know my life. That could’ve been the very worst pain I’ve ever-”

“Sure,” Steve returns, and if that’s how he’s dealing with this, then fair play to him, because all Bucky can do is sit back and watch this unfold. It’s… unsettling. They haven’t talked about it, but- it would be a lie to say that Tony hadn’t been laying heavy on Steve’s mind. Fuck, it would be a lie to say he hadn’t been on _Bucky’s_ mind, and they weren’t even _soulmates._

If, of course, they _were_ soulmates.

So when they mimic each-others body language, Bucky feels it under his skin. It itches, like so many things did these days.

And he wants to fucking _gut_ himself, because- If Steve’s new plan was to make Tony realise they were soulmates organically, naturally? Then Bucky really was intruding on sacred space, here. If this were a cautionary tale he’d be walking straight into the faerie circle, trapped forevermore in a dimension with no escape, sitting by himself in _hell_ and-

He realises, not for the first time, but for perhaps the most obvious, that he really cannot do this with a clean conscious.

So as Steve clambers down onto his hands and knees to sketch next to Tony, Bucky puts a hand on his shoulder to tell him he’s leaving-

And _again_ , with this fucking _warmth,_ he feels like his soul is full all at once and he’s never been fucking _angrier,_ _god,_ Barnes, there should be some form of interdimensional law that would put him in goddamn jail for being party to this-

So he says, “I’m leaving.”

And Steve looks up at him with wide eyes and Tony with calculating ones, and then he pads out of the clearing on gentle steps and then-

He feels it rather than sees it. The portal convulses. He knows because he can feel its pull, now, around his rib cage, around his abdomen. He can feel it in his organs, his viscera, his white blood cells and his brain. He knows without even a moment's doubt that the portal wants him to stay, but being completely honest with himself, to let this fucking _farce_ continue, with him at the beck and call of someone else’s fate, would be _beyond_ hell. These ups and downs, this fucking rollercoaster rigor mortis, he couldn’t _take_ it. He would be angry and then fine and then more furious still, until one day it’s Steve and Tony’s interdimensional wedding and he just fucking screams.

So he keeps walking. He takes a stride with purpose, feels his limbs screaming for him to stay, and takes another stride.

And then-

He can’t see it. He can’t see it, but he knows it’s happening, because there’s an explosion as he clears the threshold of the clearing. The portal _spits_ them away, drags Bucky back kicking and screaming. When Bucky turns around from the floor, Tony is curled in a heap against a hard metal workbench, and Steve is face down in the dirt.

And if fate were real, if all of this were real, if it were as tangible as the dirt beneath him, then it would tell him what to do.

It doesn’t, so Bucky hovers in the threshold and waits for them to get back up. It’s-

He should help. He should wrench Steve from this place, this interdimensional fate-trap, should drag him away from Tony Stark and the way that they were simply unable to end this well. He should pull him away so that Tony can go back to posting party pictures on Instagram, back to ‘wish you were here’ on Twitter, back to whatever it was his life was like before he fucking lived in a lab. He should prevent them from ever coming back to this godforsaken place, where Steve had been allowed to see into another dimension only on that a) they could never be together, and b), that Bucky had to bear witness to his own personal hell.

He doesn’t help.

Tony pulls himself up first, staggering as he stands. He looms taller than he ever has, taller than he should, and stretches out his back with a crack. And then he whispers, “Steve?”

And Bucky bursts into flames.

Because Tony _doesn’t_ look at Steve first. Tony looks at Bucky. He doesn't say, "Steve?" Instead, he says, “Barnes?”

And it all falls apart, if it hadn’t already.

“I can’t do this!” he howls, at the goddamned sky.

Tony blinks and then winces. “Yeah,” he says. “That much is clear.”

“He’s meant to be your _soulmate,_ asshole, this is as much your fault as it is mine-” And Tony goes from tired and quiet to raring and aggressive in the space of a second.

“What the fuck are you _talking_ about? Is this some kind of fucking _joke_?” Tony snarls. “How is this my fault?”

“It’s-” He starts, spitting, but- This isn’t Tony’s fault, not really. He didn’t… he didn’t know. Couldn’t even figure out why the portal had made them feel-

Wait.

What-?

“One second,” Bucky hisses out, holding his head in his hands. Steve is still on the floor, and his thoughts are racing.  “I-”

(If Bucky was paying attention, he’d notice that Tony’s raised hands slowly drop to his sides.)

The-

The portal hadn’t opened unless Bucky had been there. The portal- the portal hadn’t wanted him to leave. It had spat the other two out. It had-

When it was just Tony and Steve-

“Tony,” he says, carefully. Purposively, but as gentle as he can. “When you and Steve touch through the portal, did you get the- the feedback?”

Tony blinks at him. “No.”

“Oh my _god._ ”

Bucky feels the realisation as nausea. “You’re- you _are_ his soulmate.” His mouth starts, but Tony’s reacting before he can finish.

“You’re-” he squints. “You’re serious? So- I-” he’s shuddering. “Okay! Okay, this is fine. This is chill. I can deal with that, we’re fine, I’m fine, It’s like- It’s like that meme, haha, I’m fine! He-” He mouth is spilling out words as he clutches at his sides and shakes.  “Totally not maniacs, totally haven’t- totally haven’t led you on, this is fucking-” he heaves a breath. “Ideal! Good. This is great, this is what _I wanted-”_

Tony keeps talking nonsense-word-nothings, fingers fidgeting and limbs looping around each other in a dance he’s not sure Tony’s aware of.

“Tony…”

Steve stirs on the floor. He’s breathing.

“I can’t!” Tony stresses out. “I can’t deal with this right now, Rhodey and P-Pepper, they’re, they’re on my heels trying to figure out what the fuck I’m _doing_ with my life! Soulmates are for people with _time_ , Barnes, not for me, not for people who barely remember to _sleep!_ Fucking _let alone_ help support someone- It’s! Like a relationship! I can barely do relationships, Barnes, I can’t-”

Bucky sticks out a placating hand as Steve sits up. “Call me Bucky,” he tries.

It’s the wrong thing to say.

Tony looks at him wildly. “Look, I’m not trying to- I don’t- I’m just trying to understand how you can possibly think I’m, _me,_ ” he points at himself in shaking movements, “How you can possibly think this _mess_ is the soulmate of the patron saint of _patience._ He’s- You’re- _Barnes, shut your mouth and let me talk-”_

Bucky feels his stomach drop and his mouth opens before he thinks, and-

“I think you’re my soulmate too, Tony.”

Tony’s face waxes white. “Oh, god.” He says. He covers his mouth with white and shaking fingers. “You feel it too?”

And god, oh god, what the fuck has he _done-_

Steve is still blinking blearily back into existence, and Bucky- he staggers backward at the realisation- this was _fucked,_ his soulmate, his fucking soulmate, his soulmate was Steve’s, and they’re- god this is some fucking _video game_ shit, there can only be one, his brain is alight and on fire and simmering-

The only thing going faster than his thoughts is Tony’s mouth.

“I! I thought you hated me, I thought, you did, you definitely hated me, I watched you all this time and I dropped _hints,_ you’re so- you were always so unobtainable and I felt so _bad,_ so bad, god, You _did_ hate me, and Steve! God bless his fucking heart, and I really hope whatever god there is sends him to heaven because he deserves it, and for some, for some,” he heaves a breath, “For some reason he _liked_ me, and I’ve never been so fucking scared of what’s going on in someone’s head in my _life,_ because there was-”

“Breathe, Tony.” It’s said from his own shaking lips and his racing thoughts don’t subside, but Tony does seem to slow.

He’s like the revving of a car engine, all bark but no bite, and he says, “Look after Steve. See you next week.”

And he switches off the portal in a flash of white light.

This time, Bucky actually notices the pull in his guts that wrenches him towards the portal as it shuts.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! As always, anyone interested in beta!ing is welcome to message me, I'd love to chat more about this !verse. Comments are basically teamwork, and as we know, teamwork makes the dreamwork, lads.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me [ here,](http://verulams.tumblr.com/) or [ here, ](http://verulamfic.tumblr.com/) (though im less active on my fic account than i should be). You can also follow me on twitter, [@verulamfic](https://twitter.com/verulamfic)!
> 
>  
> 
> This is unbeta'd for now, we'll see where it takes us! :)


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